In May 1975 David Barnard (Organising Secretary – Albany Trust) and Antony Grey (Managing Trustee – Albany Trust) were corresponding with Sidney Bunt the Training Officer of the National Association of Youth Clubs. Since autumn 1974 the National Association of Youth Clubs had been working with the Albany Trust to set up a 2 day training conference on youth sexuality for people who train youth workers, ‘multipliers’ to cascade the training.

Rev Michael Butler, the Trust’s Counselling Trustee (and to whom Robin Bryans had reported Father Colin Gill’s abuse of boys) would be relying on Sidney Bunt to arrange his overnight accommodation for the conference being held at NAYC’s offices on 30 Devonshire Street on Wednesday 28 and Thursday 29 May

Harold Haywood OBE (ex-Director of the National Association of Youth Clubs) and Tony Smythe (Director of MIND)

Ex-HBOS Chairman chairs NAYC

The Chairman of NAYC at the time was Dennis Stevenson was later to become Baron Stevenson of Coddenham of Suffolk, HBOS chairman for 7 years, raised to the House of Lords by Tony Blair in 1999, but at the time was recently married and just started a new job. His credential for chairmanship of NAYC stemmed from having conducted research reports into youth clubs and pop festivals at the Prime Minister Ted Heath’s request.

These included chairmanship of the National Association of Youth Clubs (where he met his great friend, Peter Mandelson) and being asked by Ted Heath, then Prime Minister, to head a study into pop festivals.

His day job had been since 1971 as Head of Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee New Town Development Corporation (NPDC). By 1977 Stevenson had chaired two HMSO reports for Department of Education:

New Age Travelers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity By Kevin Hetherington

Sir Harold Haywood, Savile, NAYC & PHAB

Sir Harold Haywood’s involvement with NAYC is listed as having ended in 1974 although its not yet clear as to why, and in February 1975 it was announced he and 3 other new trustees were joining the Albany Trust. Before joining the Albany Trust he had already become Director of the Education Interchange Council involved in facilitating foreign exchanges for educational purposes.

Six months after joining as a trustee, in September 1975 Haywood will take on the Chair of Trustees role at Albany Trust, meet with a number of Paedophile Information Exchange committee members including Peter Righton and lead the way in writing to the Guardian to ask of child prostitution rife at Playland’s Piccadilly Circus and Charles Hornby’s involvement, ‘Who was exploiting whom?’ It is during Haywood’s 30 months with the Albany Trust that they team up with the Paedophile Information Exchange to co-draft a Q&A booklet on Understanding Paedophilia which asserts child abusers are a social benefit without whom voluntary services and youth welfare work would be practically impossible – essentially pedophiles as a ‘free’ source of labour for social services – but at what price?

However, Haywood as Chair of the Trustees was not Antony Grey’s first choice. In autumn 1974, just as PIE was setting up, Grey was casting around for a high profile Chair to further the Trust’s ‘respectable’ image.

He chose to ask Sir Peter Morrison’s sister-in-law – Sara Morrison – wife of Devizes MP Sir Charles Morrison, who was still in position as Vice-Chair of the Conservative party and Sir Peter was preparing to back Thatcher in February’s Tory Leadership election. Sir Peter had only joined the House of Commons in February 1974.

Despite Haywood’s departure, with his London flat at 22 Park Crescent round the corner from Devonshire House NAYC HQ Savile stopping by was still a frequent occurrence and he maintained close links with both NAYC and PHAB beyond Haywood’s tenure. During 1974 and 1975 Savile was holding annual fundraising events ‘Tea-rific’ for NAYC and while writing his autobiography (published in 1974) referred to himself as Vice-President to Angus Ogilvy’s President. In 1974 Savile had also become Honorary President of PHAB when it became an independent charity.

Savile ran many marathons for PHAB, including the half marathon round Hyde Park, undertaking PHAB sponsored walks in Jersey and Northern Ireland. During Haywood’s time in 1970 PHAB had launched a TV fundraising appeal with Cliff Richard fronting the advert. Cliff along with Savile, Rolf Harris and Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart were to become four major entertainers appearing publicly for PHAB fundraising.

Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, by Robin Ince (published 2010)

Did Savile have access and opportunity to abuse vulnerable children and teenagers (some of whom had physical disabilities) at NAYC and PHAB Discos? Will these two charitable organisations be able to safeguard children against abuse by celebrities or public figures in future if they haven’t already reported on how Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris came to be involved in their fundraising, invited into positions of authority by whom?

In 1971 Savile had started the Dymomania treasure Trail fundraising event at the Post Office Tower and on 15 July 1973 hosted a PHAB BBC Radio 1 Speakeasy. With the Earl of Snowdon as Patron of PHAB and the Queen Mother as Patron of NAYC Savile had increased access for networking with royalty.

21 October, 1981. The Times. ‘Reception.’ ‘The Earl of Snowdon, Patron of PHAB (physically handicapped and able bodied) and Mr Jimmy Savile (president) were hosts at a reception and dinner held at the Mount Royal Hotel yesterday to launch the charity’s silver jubilee celebration for 1982. Among the guests were: Mr Hugh Rossi, Minister of state for Social Security and the Disabled […].’

Savile and the PHAB Russian Princess

Mecca Security employed retired ex-Met and City police officers. Alan Francis, a retired City police officer who went to work for Mecca Leisure as Head of Security (1978 – 1991) published the following in a police publication

“After retiring from the beloved City I went to work for Mecca Leisure, on the edge of show-business, where I met JS several times. At the Cafe de Paris , Coventry Street, the manageress Avril Matthews McClay, a singer, had been through a traumatic experience when her husband and child had been killed in a plane crash and she had been nursed by JS in Stoke Mandeville Hospital. At the Cafe de Paris there was a charity evening for the disabled. The Royal Marines turned up in uniform to carry the disabled inside and Jimmy Saville arrived with a Russian Princess. Paul Daniels also later arrived in support of Avril to give a free show of magic which was amazing. A lot of money was raised for the disabled-related charity PHAB (Physically Handicapped Able Bodies).”

The Russian Princess, Princess Jean Galitzine, was recently honoured in 2012 for her services to PHAB, a former 1950s Dior model who had married Prince George Galtizine, a major in the Welsh Guards

“After the Bolshevik revolution, Katya’s grandfather, Prince Vladimir Galitzine, fled his Russian homeland to become an antiques dealer in Paris. His extrovert son, Emmanuel, was a Spitfire pilot during the war and held the record for the RAF’s highest altitude combat with the Luftwaffe. Katya’s father, Prince George Galitzine, was a major in the Welsh Guards, while her mother was the Dior model Jean Dawnay.”

“Roy Greenslade’s blog last Wednesday reported that Paul Connew, when editor of the Sunday Mirror in 1994, did have “credible and convincing” evidence from two women who claimed that Jimmy Savile had been guilty of abusing them at a children’s home. Though “totally and utterly convinced” they were telling the truth, the paper’s lawyers, after a careful assessment, decided it wasn’t strong enough to risk publication. The risk was libel and the substantial costs and damages that the newspaper could face should they lose a subsequent high court case from the litigious Savile. To the in-house lawyers at Mirror Group, the risk seemed too great. Connew went further in talking about his guilt relating to this onNewsnight last Thursday. But there is perhaps another angle to the story.

In 1992, my father, George Carman QC, had been retained by Savile’s lawyers over a different matter, which never reached court. By 1994, the name Carman, and what he could do in cross-examination, put such fear into the minds of litigants, lawyers and editors that libel cases were settled and, in some circumstances, perhaps stories were not published. Savile may have been one of those. As an indication of Carman’s universal demand, and the respect he instilled, one has to look no further than theGuardian itself. In 1995, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, when faced with a libel action from Jonathan Aitken said: “We’d better get Carman – before Aitken gets him.” They did and Aitken lost.”

There’s three points of interest I noted so far from Dominic Carman’s biography of his father published 12 years ago

2. July 1983: Carman also defended Peter Adamson, better known as Len Fairclough from Coronation Street, lover of Pat Phoenix

3. During the 1970s George Carman was standing counsel to the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, James Anderon (p.78) a connection he tries to use when caught drink driving during the Thorpe trial in November 1978 although to no avail – Carman is fined £150 and banned from driving for a year!

1. Carman and Prime

“By contrast, the next high-profile client caused him disgust and revulsion in equal measure. Geoffrey Prim was a Russian-speaking civil servant charged with spying. At Cheltenham GCHQ Britain’s secret communications headquarters, he spied on behalf of the KGB for fourteen years, handing over hugely damaging information on the entire NATO security operation in Europe. As if that was not bad enough, he was also a paedophile with detailed card-index files of little girls in the Cheltenham and Gloucester area. Additional charges were brough of indecent assault against three schoolgirls. Perveted sexual activity may have made Prime a target for the Russians. But this is purely conjecture.” [p.112 below]

A complaint by convicted spy Geoffrey Prime that the News Of The World made false allegations against him and declined to correct them was rejected.

Alex Marunchak had said Mr Prime, jailed for 38 years, was originally arrested for sexual offences against young girls. He had made many espionage contacts through a child-sex network in Britain and America. Police feared he may have used these to blackmail prominent people in all walks of life.

Using the alias Jacques DuGay he had joined NAMBLA. a North American association closely linked with the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in Britain. US police confirmed he contacted other perverts through NAMBLA and may have blackmailed top people into supplying information. Security chiefs feared the KGB would continue blackmailing his contacts.

Mr Prime’s solicitors told the editor it was untrue that Mr Prime belonged to or had contact with NAMBLA or PIE, that he blackmailed people or gave the KGB information for blackmailing, that he had espionage contacts, and that he ever used the name Jacques DuGay. They asked for a published retraction.

Mr Henry Douglas, legal manager, replied that following a tip-off by a Scotland Yard contact the News Of The World spoke to other police in Los Angeles and New Jersey and learnt that after police raids on NAMBLA members’ homes Mr Prime’s name and alias were very familiar to them in a list of UK paedophiles. The newspaper carefully checked with British police sources and would not publish a retraction.

Adjudication: The News Of The World has told the complainant’s solicitors and the Press Council of the steps it took to verify with American and British sources the allegations it published about the complainant Mr Geoffrey Prime, following his conviction. In the Press Council’s view the newspaper did as much research as it could before publishing its detailed story. Despite their view that the allegations about Mr Prime were fanciful and inconsistent with the known facts, his solicitors have failed to satisfy the Press Council that the allegations were false. The complaint against the News Of The World is, therefore, not upheld. (U9823-1983).

The Sun produced no evidence for its allegation that at the trial of the spy Geoffrey Prime the attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, held back mention of the accused man’s involvement with a child-sex organisation to avoid embarrassing security chiefs, Council said when upholding Sir Michael’s complaint that the editor refused to withdraw this false allegation and declared that the editor should either have substantiated or withdrawn it.

Brian Dixon had reported that Prime’s perverse obsession with little girls, which laid him open to blackmail, was not discovered by the security services. Papers found at his home showed he belonged to a child-sex organisation, Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), but no evidence about the find was given at his Old Bailey trial. US spymasters were furious and could not understand how British vetters did not discover Prime’s peculiarities. They were convinced the Attorney General did not mention the involvement with PIE to save embarrassing British security chiefs.

For the Attorney General, Mr J. Nursaw, complained to the editor, Mr Kelvin MacKenzie, that Sir Michael knew of no evidence connecting Mr Prime with PIE, and the Director of Public Prosecutions had assured him police found none. The Attorney General sought a prominent correction as soon as possible. Mr MacKensie replied that Mr Dixon stood by every word. His source was a senior police officer. One of the magazines found at Mr Prime’s home was sold only to PIE members. He would not run a correction but would write to Sir Michael.

Adjudication: The Sun’s story about the background of the spy Geoffrey Prime was written by a reporter of long experience and high reputation, Mr Brian Dixon. He has provided the Council with a detailed statement of what proved to be true – background information about Mr Prime which he gathered from a long established but unnamed contact. Mr Dixon has said that the contact also told him police found two Paedophile Information Exchange magazines at Mr Prime’s home. The magazines were later mentioned to the reporter by a senior London police officer, also unnamed, and another anonymous police contact said the Americans had expected Mr Prime’s involvement with a child-sex cult to come out at his trial.

Mr James Nursaw was the legal secretary to the Law Officers’ Department at the time – is this a role of legal adviser to the Attorney-General? I guess the buck has to stop somewhere. Else. With a civil servant. As usual. Interesting question I’d never considered before: ‘Who advises the lawyer who advises the Attorney-General who advises the government of the law?’

No Ordinary Man, p.113, Defending Geoffrey Prime

2. Carman defends Adamson

In July 1983 George Carman defended Peter Adamson, a 53 year old actor who had played Len Fairclough in Coronation Street almost from its inception in the early 1960s. Despite eye witness accounts from two police officers who saw the assaults with their own eyes, on site due to the fact Adamson made a regular habit of Saturday morning sessions at Haslingdean swimming pool, near Blackburn Lancashire. Carman was able to point out that 80 out of the 82 words of their descriptions of Adamson’s assault in their notebooks were the same calling the evidence ‘incestuously identical’. Getting Adamson off the hook sealed Carman’s reputation as the Great Defender and in 1988 Adamson added to that reputation by confessing his guilt to The Sun in a front page exclusive.

Compare and Contrast the Wikipedia entry on Adamson’s alleged assault and subsequent(who passed away in 2002):

Allegation

On 24 April 1983, a Sunday newspaper reported that Adamson had been arrested for indecently assaulting two eight-year old girls in a public swimming pool in Haslingdenwhere he had assisted as a part-time instructor. One was allegedly assaulted the day before, the other on 16 April. The police complaint alleged that Adamson’s hands had strayed while giving the girls swimming lessons.[2]

He was represented by the barrister George Carman QC, who had a prominent career defending celebrities. On 26 July 1983, a Crown Court jury found Adamson not guilty. The following year, after his wife’s death and still suffering financial woes and drinking problems, he was allegedly persuaded by freelance Sun reporter Dan Slater to change his story following several bottles of whisky. Adamson was alleged to have told Slater “I am totally guilty of everything the police said”….”But what I hope you will print – there was no sexual intent.”[2]

As a result, Lincolnshire Police interviewed Adamson who categorically denied the confession. No charges were made against him.”

Sacking

In February 1983, Adamson was suspended from Coronation Street after selling stories about the show and cast to a tabloid newspaper. Following his arrest for alleged indecent assault in April 1983, Granada Television decided not to support him financially through his legal problems. Although he was cleared of the charge in July, he was sacked from Coronation Street by producer Bill Podmore on 26 August 1983 for breach of contract when it was discovered Adamson had sold his memoirs for £70,000 afterthe previous warning, in order to pay the £120,000 legal debts from his trial.[2]

Although his last actual appearance in the series was shown in May 1983 (which had been filmed before his suspension), Len Fairclough was killed off-screen in a motorway crash in December 1983. To demonise the character, it was revealed that he had been returning home from an affair, cheating on wife Rita (Barbara Knox).[2]

Adamson celebrated the character’s death by delivering an obituary on TV-am dressed as an undertaker.

Lord Lambton vs. Lord Mountbatten

Three years into Edward Heath’s run as Prime Minister, on 22 May 1973 Minister Lord Lambton, Parliamentary under secretary for Defence (RAF) resigned as Conservative MP for Berwick-Upon-Tweed, his constituency for almost 22 years. This triggered a by-election which the Liberal party’s Alan Beith won, (who’d previously fought Lambton and lost in 1970 election) joining the small number of Liberal MPs that as the ‘joke’ went, could all fit in a taxi together

Lambton’s scandal was exposed in the News of the World with smoky sepia-tint photos of him in bed with two prostitutes, (presumably as a result of the night photo lens Colin Levy the shadowy special services executive married to S&M prostitute Norma)

“In May 1973 he was exposed by conman Colin Levy, who used a camera hidden behind a peephole in a mirror to photograph the peer in bed with the conman’s prostitute wife Norma Levy, 26, and another woman Kim Pinder, at their flat in Maida Vale. Audio recordings were made using a microphone hidden in a teddy bear’s nose next to Norma’s bed.

It emerged that Norma, known as The Nun, had been part of a 15-strong ring of prostitutes run by society madam Jean Horn, whose clients included Lord Jellicoe, Leader of the House of Lords, who was also forced to resign” [Sex Scandal Lord’s family at war over Lambton estate (Daily Express 11 October 2013)]

“Lambton’s edition of The Recollections of Three Reigns by Queen Victoria’s secretary Sir Frederick Ponsonby ruffled a few feathers by asserting that the new breed of courtiers — drawn from the Services and “insecure in their social position”— was “less effective” than that drawn from the “best families in England”.

But his carefully researched first part of a two-volume study, The Mountbattens (1989), drew widespread criticism for its acerbic portrayal of Earl Mountbatten as a bemedalled social climber who lied about his German ancestry to enhance his claims to royal status. Lambton was persuaded not to persist with the proposed second volume, which was to have dealt with Mountbatten’s career.” (Daily Telegraph Obituary of Lord Lambton, 2 Jan 2007)

“The final by-election triumph, at Berwick-on-Tweed, symbolised my personal attitude to electioneering – and also signalled the end of the road for the Liberal euphoria wagon. The seat became vacant, it will be remembered, because Lord Lambton, the Tory, resigned after being involved in a tawdry affair with London prostitutes. The morality issue was, however, never raised by the Liberals in the campaign, as far as I am aware, and when I spoke there I was determined to ignore it: I do not believe in the politics of the smear. A man’s private life is his own affair.” (Big Cyril, Cyril Smith, p148 published 1978)

‘We won the Berwick seat, and its victor, Alan Beith is arguably the best Parliamentarian at Westminster.” (ibid, p.149)

However, newspapers outside the UK were at the time reporting an international ‘vice’ ring supplying young boys to men in London, Paris and other European capitals [British Sex Scandal may involve others, The Gadsden Times, 22 May 1973]

At no 58 Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood, in a road behind Abbey Road Studios (the Abbey was Kilburn Abbey) and just across the Edgware Road from Little Venice, although very much on the side of Maida Vale), Lord Lambton and his wife Bindy and their children had moved into the art-deco former house of Bindy’s aunt Freda Dudley Ward, the mistress of the Prince of Wales (Edward the Abdicator in 1936) from 1918 – 1923. The year the Lambtons moved in was 1966, also the year Savile first claimed to have made Mountbatten’s acquaintance. Bindy had set about redecorating, having a splendid butterfly shaped swimming pool installed. Seven years later Antony Lambton was to be caught at no 9 Marlborough Court (virtually across the road in a turning off Edgware Road opposite Maida Vale station). While he certainly believed in straying, Lambton didn’t believe on straying far when it came to distance.

“On about their fifth meeting, she reveals for the first time, he arranged for a handsome young male prostitute, aged about 20, to join them, and asked her to watch him have sex with the man.

‘I still feel a little embarrassed about that,’ she drawls, sipping strong black coffee. ‘I wasn’t used to seeing two men having sex. I think he was bisexual. But mostly he just liked to smoke pot, and there was a bit of conversation. You know what? We didn’t really have much sex.‘” [Call girl who nearly toppled government, Daily Mail, 26 January 2007)

The story of Freda Dudley Ward, Bindy’s aunt is an interesting tale in itself, setting up the Four Feathers youth charity nearby on behalf of the Prince and run as a Prince of Wales (three feathers being the fur-de-lys of the plumed crown) venture despite the Prince’s apparent disinterest in both Freda and the charity once he had been left by Thelma, in Wallis Simpson’s capable hands.

Maida Vale, W9

As the traditional home of elite escorts for about 150 years, where royalty in particular liked to keep their mistresses, Maida Vale and its local environs is unsurprisingly quite the focal point of a number of scandals over the years. In 1934 the BBC bought the failed 1907 built Edwardian ice skating rink to become BBC Maida Vale Studios in Delaware Road, recording big bands and later where DJ John Peel would record his Radio 1 Peel Sessions, and so the area from thereon in also began to attract broadcasting and musical celebrities of the day. People such as comedian Benny Hill had a flat at Cunningham Court, and according to this article by 1964 actor Victor Beaumont and DJ Alan ‘Fluff” Freeman were Maida Vale residents: Savile and Freeman showed me no pity, says victim abused by BBC DJs when he was just 11, Daily Mail, 22 September 2013

As Edgware Road descends from Kilburn, Cricklewood, cuts through Maida Vale W9 (Maida Hill) it passes the postcodes of NW1 (Marylebone), NW8 (St John’s Wood / Lisson Grove), W2 (Paddington), and nearing central London, heading south towards the corner of Hyde Park occupied by Speaker’s Corner, it ends just before Marble Arch and the former site of the Tyburn gallows (the area is now being renamed Tyburnia in estate agents’ bumf, focused around Connaught Square/Connaught Village where the Blair family townhouse is, along from Portsea Hall where Antony Blunt died at no 45, 6th floor on 26 March 1983, close to the church his father Reverend Stanley Blunt St John’s The Evangelist Hyde Park (see horse riders service in September) had been at when he was a child and had visited his cousin Elizabeth, seven years his senior, who married one of the sons of King George V when Blunt was just 16 in 1923 and lived in Mayfair at Bruton Street, just across from Hyde Park and Park Lane.

“One name that could well appear in Blunt’s description of his early life is that of his cousin, a certain Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – later, of course, to become the Queen Mother.

Blunt’s mother Hilda was a 2nd cousin of the Earl of Strathmore, Elizabeth’s father.

The young Anthony and his two brothers Christopher and Wilfrid occasionally used to have tea with Elizabeth at the family’s London home in Bruton Street, Mayfair – the house from which she was driven to Westminster Abbey in 1923 (when Blunt was 16) to marry the Duke of York, later King George VI.” [Last Secrets Queen Mother’s favourite traitor: Memoirs of Society Spy Anthony Blunt rock royals, Daily Mail, 27 June 2009]

On Blunt’s father’s side his grandfather had been the Rt Rev Lord Bishop of Hull when his father Rev Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt had married Hilda Violet Master at St Andrew’s, Ham, Surrey on 18 October 1900.

During the 50s (and possibly beyond) it was Paddington that was crime central, also close to Maida Vale, attracting characters like Jack Spot, the Krays, Billy Hill and Gyp.

Writing in Chiantishire

So despite gallivanting off to landscape a garden in Italy with his mistress (debutante of the year 1954) and become Lord of Chiantishire as folk joked, Lambton continues to nurse something of a grudge for Lord Mountbatten throughout restoring his Italian villa and begins researching and writing what he intends to be a 2 volume account of The Mountbattens. A decade after Mountbatten’s murder in 1979 Lambton publishes his first volume with a back sleeve that reads:

Blow the dust off the Mountbatten family album and discover the truth behind one of Europe’s most famous royal dynasties. Royal insider Antony Lambton uncovers the real story – a story rife with trumped-up lineage, paternity scandals, and stormy marriages.

In this authoritative history, Lord Lambton sheds light on the illicit union that resulted in the births of Prince Alexander of Hesse and his sister Marie, Empress of Russia. You’ll meet Sandro, the sacked ruler of Bulgaria, who was torn between his duty to the Princess of Prussia and his passion for a seductive actress. You’ll also witness the infamous, trouble-causing marriage of the rakish Alexander and the commoner Julia Hauke.

In many respects the history of the Mountbattens is the history of Europe, and across Lambton’s pages parade some of the continent’s most famous – and notorious – personages” Queen Victoria, George V, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Alexander II and William Gladstone. Even soviet spy Anthony Blunt played a role in the Mountbatten past.”

The Canadian Publishers

Interestingly, Lambton’s publishers are M&S Paperbacks from McClelland & Stewart Inc who feature as their imprint the words ‘The Canadian Publishers’ – a slogan which would not have been lost on Mountbatten had he been alive to see the publication.

Following the disastrous raid on Dieppe where over 3,000 Canadian troops were killed like fish being shot in a barrel in 1942, Lord Beaverbrook (a Canadian media mogul who owned the Express) never let Mountbatten forget. [The wartime raid that shamed Mountbatten, Daily Express, 20 August 2012]

country which following Lord Beaverbrook’s outspoken venom for Mountbatten following Dunkirk is unsurprising.

Over the last 10 years further information has come to light

“Former MI6 agent Lee Tracey told the Mail on Sunday that his bosses wanted to expose Lambton in a bid to embarrass MI5, which had failed to act against his activities.

Mr Tracey claimed he supplied a night-vision lens to the News of the World, which allowed the newspaper’s photographer to take the photograph from a cupboard.

He said he received a phone call telling him to loan the specialist equipment to the paper.

The Echo revealed last month that a security services report into the scandal raised fears that Lambton would be driven to suicide.

The concerns were contained in files released to the National Archive under the 30-year rule, which detailed a Security Commission inquiry by MI5 officer Charles Elwell.” [Lambton ‘victim of MI6 dirty tricks’ Sunderland Echo, 19 Janary 2004]

“This, at least, is Norma’s story. Others suggest that she connived with Levy, and was motivated either by money (she estimates that worldwide newspaper sales of the story made £100,000 – more than £600,000 today) or, more sinisterly, was involved in a conspiracy to discredit Lambton and the government.

Inevitably, Norma dismisses these accusations. However, she believes there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Lambton was the victim of a smear plot, albeit without her knowledge.

For one thing, she questions whether Levy had the expertise or cunning to have set up the hidden camera, which was positioned behind a stereo system in the wardrobe facing her double-bed. To record Lambton’s voice, a listening device was also embedded in the nose of Norma’s giant teddy-bear.

‘Colin was into a lot of deep, heavy stuff. I think the whole thing was set up and he [Lambton] was sacrificed for this big plot,’ she says.

‘I was a pawn in the game, too. It was very sad. Colin knew too much about my life. I started trusting him. I didn’t think he was that type of person. Some people don’t have a conscience about what they do.’

Norma’s theory gains credence when we remember how, three years ago, a retired MI6 operative named Lee Tracey admitted to being part of a ruse to expose Lambton.

Tracey says MI6, responsible for overseas intelligence, was concerned because its home-based sister organisation, MI5, knew Lambton used prostitutes but had done nothing to deter him.

“Mountbatten had put in charge of the raid’s military intelligence a racing driver playboy chum, the Marquis de Casa Maury, a totally unqualified amateur from Cuba.

The blame, however, was shifted on to the Canadian task force commander Major-General John Roberts, who himself was the victim of poor information and the communications breakdown that characterised the day’s events.

Partly thanks to Dieppe, there has been a major shift in the perception of Mountbatten’s character in recent years.

Historian Andrew Roberts has dealt the hardest hammer blow to his reputation.

He has convincingly depicted “Dickie” Mountbatten as a psychopathically ambitious, vain, disingenuous, manipulative adrenaline junkie and a man who was utterly careless of other people’s lives.

Whether this view is fully justified is debatable but even at the time of Dieppe many military people were wary of Dickie’s cronyism and mad gung-ho schemes.

At the Admiralty he was known as the “Master of Disaster”.

One eminent biographer who admired Mountbatten became so sickened by his subject’s disrespect for the truth that he put a sign on his writing desk: “Remember, in spite of it all, he was a great man.”

Mountbatten was certainly great at public relations and the art of making sure no mud stuck to him.

Montgomery had always thought the raid was absurd and it is a tragedy that his view that it should be called off wasn’t heeded.

When the news came through of the scale of the disaster the press baron Lord Beaverbrook – owner of this newspaper and a Canadian – went puce with rage.

He would have been more furious had he known that vital intelligence from codebreakers at Bletchley Park had been ignored.

Beaverbrook went so far as to call Mountbatten a murderer.

Any stain on Mountbatten’s reputation was defl ected by the timely release, just after Dieppe, of a film based on his life as a naval officer, In Which We Serve.

Noel Coward showed him his fawning script based on the daring adventures of his ship HMS Kelly, which was sunk in 1941 during the Battle of Crete.

Mountbatten supplied Coward with vivid stories, stating that he and the survivors had been machine-gunned in the water, an event that appears in the film but which none of his shipmates recall happening.

COWARD played the Captain in the film that did a great deal to secure the Mountbatten legend in the general public’s mind. Roberts states that Mountbatten saw it 11 times.” [The wartime raid that shamed Mountbatten, Daily Express, 20 August 2012]

The chap in charge of the Dieppe raid as appointed by Mountbatten – the Marques de Casa Maury, was the second husband of Freda Dudley-Ward (Edward the Abdicator’s ex) who had been married to her and living at No.58 Hamilton Terrace from 1938 in their much architecturally applauded house commissioned from architects Burnet, Tait & Lorne (see Wikipedia Freda Dudley Ward further). Later to become Lambton’s family home in London when he was caught on camera in Maida Vale.

Acknowledgements & the Curious Incident of the Closed Archives

“To Lord Brabourne who courteously answered my letters making it plain I was not to see any of the Battenberg Archives. This in itself was as interesting as Sherlock Holme’s dog, who did not bark in the night. It made me draw the conclusion that every author who was not prepared to accept the Mountbatten myth would be starved of information.” (Acknowledgements, The Mountbattens, Antony Lambton, below (1989))

Lord Brabourne (1928 – 2005) served as Aide-De-Camp to Mountbatten in South-East Asia

The eldest daughter of Queen Victoria had married the Crown Prince of Germany who became Emperor Frederick III. Empress Vicky “developed a passionate wish her daughter should marry (against her father and mother0in-law’s wishes) Alexander of Battenberg. She persecuted her dying husband to agree to the match which would have ensured Bismarck’s resignation. Her letters were as fanatical as those of the last Tsarina’s, her niece.” (Lambton, caption under photo of the Emperor and Empress, p.193)

Christopher of Hesse-Cassel (grandson of Crown Princess, Vicky – Christopher was the son of her daughter Princess Margaret who had married Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse-Cassel)

“was a half-mad extremist, the associate and companion of Himmler. The wild seeds in his furious mind may have been planted by his unluckily tainted grandfather as they were in his elder brother, Prince Philip, a friend of Goering’s, who as made a general of the Storm Troopers in 1933. An enthusiastic Nazi, he admired violence and was used as a sycophantic go-between Hitler and Mussolini and Hitler and his cousin the Duke of Windsor. The latter connection may have saved him from imprisonment for after his release from Dachau he was immediately arrested on 9 April 1945 by the Americans as Target 53 in the Nazi heriarchy rounded up for interrogation. Successful British pressure prevented an embarrassing trial.

Shortly before his arrest King George VI sent his librarian and, of all people, Anthony Blunt, to retrieve secret papers considered damaging to the British royal family from his house, Freidrichschof. It is unlikely they, as suggested, related to Queen Victoria and likely they referred to Prince Philip’s wooing of the Duke of Windsor with offers of a crown. hey are now buried in Windsor but as Blunt saw them it is likely that any interesting information was passed on to the Russians.” [Lambton, p.141.-142]

In 1988 Mask of Treachery by John Costello was published on the Blunt affair, also referred to by Robin Harbinson in The Dust has never Settled: “Using newly discovered top-secret British and American reports, and confirming the resulting analysis with veterans of British intelligence and the CIA, this book uncovers a sophisticated Soviet plan to infiltrate their agents into the highest levels of British and American societies. 16 pages of photos.” Yet to be read.

More to come on Lambton’s Introduction which gives a psychologically sensitive portrayal of young Mountbatten watching his father be castigated for his Germanic lienage despite reaching heights of First Admiral, and the bullying he suffered as a result growing up during WWI.

Over the years, an assortment of musicians, authors, TV presenters, comedians and satirists have hinted at the old cliche of truth being stranger than fiction (just a whole lot less publishable) with regard to what was in circulation as to Savile’s abusive and sinister side:

“It’s common for fiction writers to get round issues of legality or taste by creating a composite figure with nudgingly familiar details. While Savile was still alive, the crime-writer Val McDermid featured a character called Jacko Vance (Savile’s middle-name was Vince) in the Wire in the Blood books. Played in the TV adaptations by John Michie, Vance is a much-loved Northern TV celebrity who hid a predilection for raping and torturing young women” (Mark Lawson, The Guardian, New Tricks: was the series finale actually about Jimmy Savile? 31 October 2012)

1. 1978: The Great Child Abuse Swindle: Johnny Rotten & what McLaren knew about ‘corruption and hypocrisy that underlay Top of the Pops’

“It’s easier to list the people I don’t want to kill.”

“I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile. He’s a hypocrite. I’ve heard he’s into all kinds of seediness which we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours. Aren’t I a bitch,” sneers Johnny Rotten in his sullen whisper.

“I’ve seen how supposed antichrists turned into bourgeoisie, Bond Street shops, the McLarens have opened a new shop in Bond Street. Yes I find that really strange.”

In 1978 Savile, aged 51-52, was busy penning God’ll Fix It, andjoining Lord Longford et al on their Porn report jaunts, having escaped unscathed from the BBC Payola report of Brian Neill QC in 1971, ending with Janie Jones prosecution in 1974 (whom Savile later quizzes on Myra Hindley offering his own opinion). Despite the tragic suicide of Clare Uffland (Savile abuse girl labelled ‘delusional’ after suicide˚) and the convenient loss of her diary, Savile’s subsequent reckoning with God (or as God?), during his December 1976 ‘moment of enquiry’ at Qumran, Dead Sea, sees him as satisfied with the direction in which he has taken his life.

Maurice Oberstein (1928 – 2001), was credited as being one of the ‘chief Architects of the UK record industry’ (The Independent Obituary, 25 August 2001). Oberstein appears to have worked hard at creating an image of zany eccentricity and creative flair through a range of gimmicks. Below is a clip of Oberstein in 1985 at the Brit Awards with one of his dogs named after record executives he admired… and would pretend to take the advice of in business meetings – see Vermorel’s article for more on gimmicks used by Oberstein like ‘Talk to the hat’.

“[Malcolm’s] other agenda was a genuine contempt for the music industry. He used to say the music industry was run by child molesters, meaning it fiddled with the sexuality of young kids to peddle bands. And of course, that is true.

He would illustrate his point with a lurid anecdote of how one evening he and a companion visited the legendary CBS executive Maurice Oberstein at home. Here, they found a young boy naked under a blanket on the sofa. Oberstein boasted he’d picked the boy up at a railway station. For Malcolm, that symbolised the corruption and hypocrisy that underlay Top of the Pops, and all the other music biz rigmarole.

But rather than denounce Oberstein, he sought to expose this latent industry paedophilia by exacerbating it. A situationist tactic that could also have been taken from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who commended “the ecstasy of making things worse.”

Malcolm just loved “making things worse.” At the expense of anyone in the way. Including 12 -year-old girls and photographers. Including me.”

“During the ten years she lived at the edge of Putney Common Jilly Cooper walked daily on this expanse of green. For most of the time she lived there she kept a diary, noting the effects of the changing seasons and writing about her encounters with dogs and humans. The book is a distillation of those diaries: an affectionate and enthralling portrait – warts and all – of life on Putney Common. Never has Jilly Cooper written more lyrically about flowers, trees, birds and the natural world; more tellingly about the sorrows – as well as the joys – of caring for dogs and children; or more outrageously about the gossip, illicit romances and jealousies of life in a small community.” [From the Amazon synopsis]

Fronting as a gay-friendly B&B used by politicians such as Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Nicholas Fairbairn (Solicitor Advocate for Scotland under Thatcher- more on him as defence counsel for spies in Dunoon here) and with reported links to Savile, it is also alleged the B&B catered to celebrities and members of the Establishment across a variety of institutions as well, all suggesting the small quaint Edwardian Elm Guest House was the source of a fair amount of gossip amongst locals if not for what was going on behind the curtains, but for the mere fact of the possibility of spotting a famous face disappearing through a non-descript door. Not least it seems from the gay house share four doors down from no 27 who share the gossip about the Elm Guest House ‘activities’ and wish to make it clear that being gay does not equate to being a child abuser, a point always worth noting. Where are those neighbours now 30+ years later?

3. 1987: Jerry Sadowitz & Savile ‘an expert in child abuse’

Nine years later, in the midst of the Cleveland Child Abuse scandal and the year Savile turned 61, Jerry Sadowitz “don’t fuck about, get an expert in, Jimmy Savile” (on which more to come from Tony Really Loves Me, Sir Stuart Bell MP’s 2000 autobiography and his crassly titled When Salem came to the Boro published in 1989). In the 1997 documentary broadcast on Tuesday 27 May ‘The death of childhood’ was shown on Channel 4, it was reported that 93 of the 121 children at the centre of the affair had been fond by the courts to be at risk of abuse and yet, as has happened in Sir Stuart Bell’s Guardian Obituary from 13 October 2012 it still had to be edited for the repeated myth that the Cleveland Abuse Scandal was a lot of nonsense cooked up by social workers and doctors.

The Independent, 26 May 1997

4. 1988: Savile on BBC’s Open To Question

Not strictly falling into the arena of artistic licence giving expression to truth when suppressed but more an example of where the Emperor’s New Ideology falls down like in the face of inquisitive youth, it was after all, the children who pointed out the Emperor was naked. A well-prepared 18-year old Krishnan Guru-Murthy hosts incisive questions from an audience of 16-18 year olds directed at Savile – the first of which suggests he is obsolete. At 11:40 a question is asked which places the programme at some point after Savile had been appointed to the Taskforce at Broadmoor, and turning Broadmoor into a holiday camp. Savile gets increasingly voluble and defensive to comments like “you seem to be quite an egotist.” A tiny glimpse into what he would have been like had he ever been put on trial perhaps?

[What bike factory in Londonderry did Savile open?]

5. 1994 (4th January and 26th December): Jeremy Hardy and Chris Morris mock Savile with very different outcomes

Within seven years of Sadowitz making his biting comments on Cleveland, mocking Savile appeared to become a more mainstream sport during 1994, sandwiched between a brilliantly drafted letter published in The Independent (4th January 1994) by Jeremy Hardy who scathes his way through an obituary to Jim’ll Fix It and doesn’t hear a peep from Jimmy (now aged 67-68) – to a fake obituary from Chris Morris on Boxing Day which sees Morris suspended from the BBC and starts 1995 with Savile suing the BBC for ruining his Christmas.

“It is with great sadness that I hear of the demise of Jim’ll Fix It, the show that made children’s dreams come true, especially recurring nightmares about old men in track suits. We shall all miss that showcase for a great English eccentric, with his extrovert clothes and jewellery. I often think that if you had been an entertainer, you would have been a sort of heterosexual Quentin Crisp: the white hair, the baubles, the affected halting speech, the air of a time that has passed.

I stress your heterosexuality because, with all the speculation about the private life of Britain’s favourite bachelor, it has never been suggested in any quarter that your preference is for anything but the female. Indeed, you have regaled us with anecdotes about your dalliances, some of which happened in the middle of marathon races] You put the ‘fun’ in ‘fun run’.

I always thought that if there had been a glamorous assistant on the show, you might have married. But it was never to be. Rather than have a family of your own, you became a trusted uncle to the nation’s children. In a way you are rather like God, only with money.

Over the years you have raised a great deal of money for charity. It might even be said that you made a career of it. I know you are rather modest about your good works, and a lot of the things you get up to never make the headlines, but perhaps it was your agent or publicist who let slip every so often that as well as being a fundraiser and jogger you also do unpaid work as a hospital porter, such is your love of pushing the disabled around.

You clearly adore those less fortunate than yourself, which means most of us. But people with disabilities have had a special place in your studio. You wanted to elevate them from the status of mere people and make them mascots for the nation, filling our screens as a reminder that, but for the grace of God, we could look like that too.

As an active Conservative, you wish to free them from the shackles of welfare and public provision, remove the stain of dignity and independence, return them to the private sector with only the munificence of patronage to grovel to. One request before you go. My little girl would like there to be a National Health Service when she grows up. Can you fix it for her?

I am intrigued to read “Grave concerns” [The Times, Joseph, Joe (4 March 1995)] where a programme called The Obituary Show on Channel 4 included Savile reading his own obituary. “Now it is being repeated and Savile dies for us once again.” Please, no one join in with Savile’s edging ever closer to his own Christly self-image building. Would be interesting to see what Savile’s self-assessment in his own obituary for the programme tells us twenty years after Qumran in 1976 and sixteen years prior to his actual death.

“Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three years as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid.” When McDermid met Savile in 1977 she was working for the Sunday People in Manchester. She’d been so struck by his barely masked air of menace,that twenty or so years later her encounter with Savile and the rumours constantly circling him helped her create the character of a serial killer masking his means to dispose of bodies in morgues with volunteer charity work.

In the early hours of the morning on 1 October 2012, a few days before the ITV Exposure programme on Savile was due to be broadcast (with newspapers speculating on Savile’s darker alter ego), Val McDermid, the Scottish crime author tweeted:

@valmcdermid@bindelj I had Savile very much at the front of my mind when I created Jacko Vance in The Wire in the Blood…5:35 AM – 1 Oct 12

She said: “When I was working as a journalist there was always stuff about Jimmy Savile and young girls and stories that he was a serial predator.

“But it was a story we could never stand up because we could never get enough credible witnesses or a critical mass of people to make it happen.

“There was always talk but we never got to the stage of interviewing people who could make claims against him.”

She eventually told the story in another way – by penning two books featuring Jacko Vance – a serial-killing sexual predator who works as a chat show host and who enjoys watching the terminally ill die in hospital.

Ms McDermid now admits she largely based the character of Vance on Savile when she created him for her book The Wire in the Blood.

I’d never read any Val McDermid so I did what any ex-book club member short on time and not having read the book does during their lunchtime… peruse the amazon reviews hoping for a plot spoiler and in doing so came across this:

Amazon reviewers said:

“In this case, the serial killer is a high-profile public personality described as the third most trusted person in England. McDermid’s descriptions of the hunt for this murderer, including the tangents and false leads, are well done. On the down side, the reader may have trouble keeping track of the many characters with common English names. McDermid’s graphic portrayals of the killer’s brutality may churn some stomachs.”

It is so convincing that one fears reality may be like this and these events the awful truth’

Ruth Rendell

Well precisely, and never more so than now it’s been revealed just how many similarities between Jacko and Jimmy were inspired by the rumours circulating Savile at the time. An attempt at a plot precis, now having read the book (very good I’ll read others but this one is over-shadowed by presence of Savile which renders it unenjoyable):

Jacko Vance, the third most trusted person in England, is a celebrity based in Yorkshire like Savile. The action is set mostly in Leeds and also at the coast to the East (Scarborough/Whitby way?) Jacko shares a distinct hatred for women with Jimmy (barring Savile’s few exceptions, notably ‘The Duchess’) and was on the surface a genial do-gooding celebrity. Jacko’s darker motive in volunteering for the local hospital in the morgue was a key to the morgue for late night access to burn body parts, including his own victims he’d imprisoned, tortured and raped.

Savile’s Autobiography As it Happens: An excerpt on “Frying My Own Pal”

“Things happen to me that don’t really happen to normal people. A friend of mine in the South of England died and I went along to his cremation. On such occasions I really try to be inconspicuous but I am very difficult to disguise. Sure enough, creeping in behind a handful of mourners I am spotted by an eagle-eyed gardner. A tap on the shoulder and I am invited, by nods and motions, behind the scenes to the business half of the crematorium. Politely showing an interest in the somewhat gruesome impedimenta I am offered the well meant but astounding job of frying my own pal. This I do, guided by the experts, and rake out his ashes an hour and twenty minutes and several cups of tea later.” (As it Happens, p.118)

“To emphasize the wide variety of my happenings a husband once said he admited the work I did so much, would I like to make love to his wife of less than a year? This is I declined, but at the other end of the spectrum, at a hospital I had just called in at, I was asked by the short-staffed head porter if I could lay out the remains of an old man who had just been burned to death and his next of kin were coming within the next hour. This job I accepted because after all these years in the hospital world I am now quite good at that sort of thing.” (p.119)

Savile had waxed lyrical about death and being near death, as well as happening to hang out at the morgue in his autobiography As it Happens(1974) – Dan Davies gets across the repetitive monotony of Savile’s recurrent anecdotes, each a little parable in cold fear in In Plain Sight (2014) – and so any author seeking inspiration would have been able to read of this from 1974 onwards.

Jimmy was originally asked to help with the radio at Leeds General Infirmary, instead requesting Joe Tyrer, Head General Porter let him work in the morgue. Joe accompanied Jimmy and The Duchess to Buckingham Palace for his OBE in 1972. As to what he got up to in the morgue, Paul Gambaccini

So despite certain marked similarities, the ‘outlandish’ suggestion of Jimmy being a serial killer who used his morgue access to cover up his own crimes and otherwise treat it as his own personal playground, plus the fact Jacko was described handsome and charming, was sufficient subterfuge to mask the parallels between them to both Jimmy and the rest of us.

7. 1996: Irvine Welsh & Freddy Royle in Lorraine Goes to Livingstone

Following Paul Gambaccini’s revelations regarding Savile’s necrophiliac interests of 23 October 2012 live on air and much to Nicky Campbell’s consternation, less than 3 weeks after the ITV programme exposing Savile, The Evening Standard published Irvine Welsh model Ecstasy necophiliac on Jimmy Savile? (Evening Standard, 24 October 2012) as a number of twitter users started to comment on the similarities in an Irvine Welsh novella they’d read. A character in Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy: Three tales of chemical romance novel, written in 1996, published in 1997, in the first section called Lorraine Goes to Livingstone, was the necrophiliac blackmailer Freddy Royle. In an interview with VICE magazine (31 October 2013) Welsh confirmed that he’d “heard some stories from people who work in the hospitals about Savile” and “it was also interesting to me that he was too big to take down.” (Irvine Welsh doesn’t regret choosing life, Nathalie Olah, VICE, 31 October 2013)

“..Freddy Royle, a necrophiliac TV personality. The hospital trustees turn a blind eye to Freddy’s nefarious pastime but have to do some fast talking when the new coroner begins asking questions.” Irvine Welsh

Rebecca Navarro, best-selling authoress of Regency romances, suffers a paralysing stroke. Assisted by her nurse Lorraine, originally from St Hubbins hospital, Rebecca plans her revenge on her unfaithful husband, Perky. Freddy Royle, hospital trustee, celebrity and necrophiliac, volunteers at the hospital and pays off morgue staff in order to abuse corpses. Perky and Royle run into one another at a Soho bookshop they chat casually over selecting porn.

When a famous rugby player dies at the hospital, the new pathologist Geoffrey Clements draws the attention of Alan Sweet, to the fact that the rugby player has been anally raped after death. Alan attempts to imply semen present would be due to changing room antics but Clements demands an inquiry. Alan and Freddy choloroform Clements and video him drugged being sexually assaulted/raped by two prostitutes as blackmail material.

As early as 1996 rumours of Savile’s necrophiliac driven desire for access to morgues was already in circulation since interestingly, both McDermid and Welsh choose to set scenes focusing on where, until recent reports of Savile’s necrophiliac activities, mainstream media was choosing not to go.

“Let me dwell on the phenomenon of being famous. I’ve not really had much time to think of it before. When I was ordinary I used to go to a turkish bath in Leeds. Sitting in the steam room would be an assortment of glistening, naked men. I used to wonder, why is that naked body rich and that one not? They look so alike now. It was easy to see why a rugby player was not a rugby player. God had just dished out a heavier or more muscular body than the norm. But why should one naked body command respect from another and what was the charisma that put one man well above his neighbour when we all sweated the same. I searched long for the answer.” (As It Happens, Savile, 1974, p. 75)

A letter from the mother of an 8 year old girl is read out asking when Skinner’s Jimmy Savile World Cup comment slot would return as a feature of the show – Baddiel replies – “Jimmy Savile loves 8 year old girls don’t they, I won’t go on” and Skinner retorts “Jimmy Savile will love her slot, that’s what I’m saying”, and then proceeds to do a Jimmy Savile impression, which they then re-run with Skinner dressed up for full effect.

“That’s why he stayed with his mum so long after she died. The blue bit in cheese is in fact a living fungus that smells slightly off and serves no useful purpose – much like Sir Jimmy himself nowadays.”

But not all the audience appeared to appreciate the joke. Nor did one of the show’s two regular team captains, Lee Mack, who told Deayton: “I am sorry but that is well out of order.”

The BBC’s editorial complaints unit intervened following a complaint from a viewer who said the joke had exceeded the bounds of acceptability.

“The scripted remarks, which focused on Sir Jimmy’s age and stories which had been current at the time of his mother’s death more than 25 years ago, were out of keeping with the tone of the preceding material and more pungently personal than warranted by his position in the public eye,” the ECU said.

The complaints unit, which deals with serious complaints about breaches of the BBC’s editorial standards, upheld the viewer’s complaint.

Deayton’s joke was included in an episode of Would I Lie To You? broadcast on BBC1 on July 28 this year.

It followed a part of the show in which guest panellist Claudia Winkleman admitted once writing to Jim’ll Fix It to ask to meet Abba.

She was offered the chance to find out how the blue bits were made in cheese instead.

The ECU said the issue would be discussed with the show’s producers – it is made by Zeppotron, part of Big Brother producer Endemol – and added the episode would not be repeated in its present form.”

Would I lie to You? (broadcast on 28th June 2007) was Deayton’s first re-appearance after 5 years largely spent in the televisual-panel-quiz-show-genre-wilderness following his sacking from the BBC for a scandal involving prostitutes and cocaine use. If the Savile rumours were now ‘old news’ they’d circulated so widely, you’d see how one might feel a little narked at the hypocrisy if Savile’s behaviour appears to be puzzlingly both tolerable and employable by the BBC, especially as when made clear by the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit’s response, the remarks were scripted in any event?

Savile on a motorbike with Agnes his mother, aged 13, This is Your Life Michael Aspel, 1990

He said: “All I have to do is call my friends in the IRA. They’ll have someone waking up in hospital the next morning eating their breakfast through a f***ing straw.

“I know the IRA, men from the IRA, and you don’t need to ask these guys twice. I’m serious. Don’t f***ing think I’m not serious. I can get them done – just with a phone call. That’s all it takes, young man.”

“On one occasion, in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, we had three people from Northern Ireland. They were in different wards. In one ward was a soldier who had been caught in gunfire and the bullet had chipped the top of his spine and rendered him paraplegic. In another ward, we had a girl of thirteen – a very pretty girl – who just happened to be standing on a street corner. She took a bullet through the throat and that rendered her paraplegic. In yet another ward, we had one of the militant bodies. He was actually doing the firing at the time. He was in a wheelchair. If anyone wanted to look at the futility of that particular course of action, they had only to look at these three people. Three lives were completely ruined. After a while, when they all started to recover, they all trundled their wheelchairs down to the hospital canteen. The four of us used to talk, and we had a lot to talk about. I wish you could have seen the four of us talking together. And three of them were all suffering from the same thing. Yet, would you believe it, they were the best of friends. So I was right in the first place. There is another way of doing things. What had happened in their situation was a mental abuse and that put these people into wheelchairs. They have learned to live with their afflictions and we all had some good laughs and a good time; they’re all back now in their various homes. Personally, I would much prefer that they were all walking about, digging in fields, going on holidays, and generally being of more use to other people. Somewhere along the line, there was an abuse of the mind. ” [God’ll Fix It, Savile, 1978, p.28]

In 2009 it was revealed that Gerry Adams Sr had abused some of his own children and that this abuse had been known about by others before he had died, buried wrapped in the Irish flag which his son is now concerned he might have ‘besmirched’. Gerry Adams reveals family’s abuse by his father (The Guardian 20 December 2009)

How the sins of the father came back to haunt Adams: The Sinn Fein leader’s revelation that Gerry Adams snr sexually abused members of his family could mean a re-evaluation of his own role during the Troubles, argues Malachi O’Doherty (The Belfast Telegraph, 22 December 2009)

A few years after Gerry Adams Sr’s demise it was revealed Liam Adams, a son of Gerry Sr and Gerry Jr’s brother, had been alleged as a child rapist and was finally put on trial 4 years later Gerry Adams’ niece reveals: ‘The Beard tried to get me to gag press over abuse’ (Belfast Telegraph 7 October 2013): Aine refers to her Uncle Gerry as ‘The Beard’. It is alleged that Liam’s main period of abuse of his daughter Aine was 1977 – 1983 from the age of four.

“Mrs Dahlstrom first brought the matter to police in 1987. This was in the midst of the Northern Ireland Troubles and a time when many people in republican communities distrusted and refused to co-operate with the security forces.

She did not pursue the matter at that stage, claiming that detectives were more interested to hear information about her famous uncle than about the allegations she was levelling against her father.

It would not be for another 20 years before she went to police again, after finding out that her father was working in a west Belfast youth club that her children attended.”

Tom Griffin is one to watch in terms of following up research into Kincora – Colin Wallace has already said he would be willing to testify at the CSA Inquiry but has warned it will need access to Intelligence documents if it is to succeed:

Back again in 1969 for his second annual fund-raising week for the Central Remedial Clinic with a 10 mile walk from the centre of Dublin to Baldoyle

BillBoard 7 June 1969

By 1973 Savile was involved on the order side of the border with the Northern Ireland Association of Youth Clubs, as reported by Billboard 15 September 1973, just as he was connected with Angus Ogilvy and Princess Alexandra (patron of Duncrofts School) and the National Association of Youth Clubs in at their HQ in London.

Billboard Sep 15, 1973: A pop festival and peace rally will be held at Nutts Corner airport near Belfast on Sept. 23. Jimmy Savile will lead a walk to the rally which is being organised by the Northern Ireland Association of Youth Clubs . . .

“With Angus Ogilvy and his super missus Princess Alexandra one feels a great friendship from the off. I am the vice-president to his Presidency of the National Association of Youth Clubs and he is often down with us at headquarters in Devonshire Street, wanting to know what’s happening. Princess Alex is a patron of a hostel for girls in care. At this place I’m a cross between a termtime boyfriend and a fixer of special trips out. The Princess is a natural for such a place. Girls in care don’t take kindly to royal rules, protocol and the like, but Alex just steams in, captures them and anyone else that’s around, and steams out.” [As it Happens, Jimmy Savile, 1974, p.150]

For Dan Davies on Savile in Northern Ireland see In Plain Sight in particular his Chapter 39. entitled Pied Piper [Loc 4490] which gives good detail on Savile’s documented ‘escapade’ on leading an 8-mile march to raise money for a new youth centre in Belfast, in particular,

‘It was moving to see women weeping as we passed, ‘ recalled Savile, who explained his grandparents had been born in Belfast, so this was like ‘coming home’.” [In Plain Sight, above]

Agnes Monica Kelly, aka The Duchess, whose parents sound like they have the more Irish sounding surname appear to have both been born in North Shields so Vincent Savile being born in Salford with parents unknown is potentially Savile’s claim to some form of Ulster heritage? Davies also notes

“There were no more IRA bombs in 1973.”

1976: A Very Merry Corrigan Christmas – Scarborough Corrigans meet a Nobel Peace Prize Winning Corrigan for the first time?

“Another girlfriend was Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire. They met in Northern Ireland when Jimmy went over to help with a peace march in the 1970s. The crowds loved him and went wild, said news reports. He brought Mairead home to Leeds and they went to Scarborough one Christmas. Mairead founded the Community of the Peace People in 1976 along with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown. Mairead was the aunt of the three Maguire children who were hit by a getaway car after its driver was shot by a solider. The deaths prompted a series of marches throughout Northern Ireland and further afield, all demanding an end to the violence. Mairead and Betty went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.” {How’s About That Then? Alison Bellamy, Loc 2353]

In November 1976 Savile returned for more peace marching, this time alongside Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan which would see “Jimmy Savile lead more than 10,000 teenagers from both sides of the sectarian divide from Ormeau Embankment in east Belfast to Crawfordsburn County Park in County Down.” [Dan Davies, In Plain Sight, Loc 4932]. Sometime soon after is Savile’s visit to the Holy Land during December 1976, with his ‘moment of enquiry’ at Qumran/Dead Sea Scrolls, and then at some point, unclear as to whether Christmas 1976 or Christmas 1977, Savile goes to Scarborough taking his new peace-marching girlfriend for his regular Corrigan family Christmas. This is all post his 1974 ‘As it Happens’ autobiography so doesn’t feature yet except for Savile to note:

“A lot of my things turn into yearly events. The taxi outings to Blackpool, Worthing and Southend I’ve been on from five to ten years and it would come hard to break the habit. Nine years I’ve done the big Dublin walk for the Central Remedial Clinic. Who would not want to walk with 35,000 great Irish teentypes?” [As it Happens, Savile, 1974, p.148]

Mairead and Betty weren’t Nobel Peace Prize winners until the award ceremony of 10 December 1977 because in 1976 it wasn’t awarded due to none of the nominations being felt to correspond with the terms of Nobel’s will – see the full presentation speech here.

“Scarborough businessman James Corrigan, whose late father had owned an amusement arcade on the seafront and accompanied Savile on midnight runs along the seafront and to the Otley Civic Ball, told his local paper how he’d grown up knowing Savile as a close family friend. ‘He’d come to our house from before I was born until last year,’ he explained, ‘with the exception of three times when he got a better offer. One of those was when Margaret Thatcher invited him to go to Chequers.’

Corrigan added that Savile regularly brought guests to these family get-togethers, including on one occasion Mairead Corrigan who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland. ‘Savile was the strangest thing anyone could inherit,’ he said, ‘and I inherited him from my father.’ [In Plain Sight, Dan Davies, 2014, Loc 7583]

Three better offers? One – Thatcher at Chequers; Two – Possibly in the Holy Land December 1976?; Three: Who/where else?

“We are all supposed to be equal under the law. Savile and Jaconelli were put above the law by North Yorkshire Police because of the charitable and civic work they performed.

Between Savile, Jaconelli and the other nine plus people we believe operated in the ring with them in Scarborough, we suspect that their victims ran into their thousands over the period 1947 – 2007. This must override any of the good that Savile and Jaconelli undoubtedly did. Otherwise they are permanently elevated to being above the law, because of their status, as they were in life.”

Ernesto, finally settled in Scarborough to have two children according to his wikipedia profile. It’s unclear whether Peter is a relation of Ernesto as either his son or nephew although they bear a marked physical resemblance facially to one another – but what is interesting is that on Ernesto’s wikipedia entry it states he toured Ireland between the wars and there taught Shaun Bolger, how to play the accordion. S

“Following on from these successes he went on the road and travelled to Ireland to perform and teach, sending the money he earned back home to his family. Whilst in Dublin he taught Shaun Bolger, who he later became a crack shot in the IRA.”

I had no idea who Sean or Shaun Bolger was until I came across this mention of him as being called ‘Flash’ at the Bureau of Military History website for Defence Forces in Ireland. This is a strange and remarkable claim to make without giving a source, but unfortunately the wikipedia biography entry doesn’t give any reference. Perhaps the links between Savile and specifically Scarborough and Ireland warrant a closer look, but this time a generation further back to a man with ‘lightening fingers’?

Corrigan has been robustly defended as not being involved in the abuse by his son in this Daily Express article of 28 October 2012. Interestingly in the comments section on a Real Whitby post here is suggested as a council corruption buster himself having personally paid for Scarborough Council’s accounts to be audited each year to the extent that Scarborough Evening News ran an expose based on Corrigan’s information and the Council were deemed to be in fear of him.

Dublin CRC 27 May 1980

1980: Lady Goulding introduces Savile to Charles Haughey, Taoiseach

“Following a meeting in 1980 at the Central Remedial Clinic, founder Lady Valerie Goulding, wrote to the Taoiseach to thank him for seeing Savile, one of the charity’s most important patrons.The document, released under the 30 Year Rule today, repeats a suggestion by the Fianna Fáil leader that the Top of the Pops front man “could be a good mediator as he really is very well in with Mrs. Thatcher and members of the Opposition as well”. Haughey and Savile sat down for tea at the CRC on 26 May 1980. The DJ became a regular visitor at Abbeville when he visited Dublin to organise sponsored walks as part of his charity work for the CRC.” For further study, see National Archives Ref 2013/100/768

In 1979 Savile’s medal from the Friends of Israel was insinuated to be an award for his service during christmas 1976 which resulted somehow in the Egyptian peace offer by Anwar Sadat due to Savile being friends with his mother-in-law. Can only imagine the horrors of Savile being chummy with your MiL?!

The very next year he is being touted as a global peace envoy closer to home.

CHARLES Haughey stole £250,000 from the money raised for the late Brian Lenihan’s liver transplant.

Mr Justice Moriarty found that Haughey “personally misappropriated” a large amount of the funds raised for the transplant in the United States for the man he described as his “closest political friend”.

Operation

In blunt terms, the tribunal chairman said it gave him “no satisfaction” to find that Mr Haughey deliberately encouraged fundraising on a scale beyond what was needed and that he used the surplus money for himself.

A total of £336,000 was raised for the operation, but just ?88,000 was actually required. This allowed Haughey to misappropriate almost £250,000.

“No other conclusion can be reached by the tribunal in the light of the evidence heard,” his report states.

The tribunal report is scathing of Haughey, stating it was “reprehensible” of him to try to blame others.

The evidence on the fundraising for Mr Lenihan’s life-saving operation arose in the context of the tribunal’s investigations into the publicly funded party leader’s account.

Account

Monies raised for the transplant were lodged into that account and the tribunal found that Haughey had misused money from this account for his own personal benefit.

In 1989, fundraising for Mr Lenihan’s operation was underway and the tribunal said the method of recording these funds was “haphazard”.

This facilitated the misappropriation of funds raised for Mr Lenihan by Haughey, as did his determination that they be lodged in the party leader’s account.

The fundraising campaign started in May 1989, although at that time Haughey already knew the VHI was prepared to make an “ex-gratia” payment of ?63,490 towards the cost of the operation.

At the time Haughey was also aware that additional funds of ?127,000 would be required, but he urged a target of up to ?250,000 to be raised.

The tribunal report outlines several donations to the fund that were “personally misappropriated” by Haughey.

“It was an unlikely destiny for an Englishwoman, the daughter of a royal adviser, who had a cameo role in the abdication of King Edward VIII in the 1930s.

As an 18-year-old, she had acted as a courier carrying messages between the king and the British prime minister.

She travelled in a pink Morris Minor between Downing Street and Fort Belvedere, where the king was staying with Wallis Simpson. The young aristocrat later met the Irish fertiliser mogul Basil Goulding after coming over for the Fairyhouse Races, and she eventually moved to Ireland.

Lady Valerie’s two unlikely friendships, firstly with Jimmy Savile and then Haughey, played a crucial role in fundraising for the clinic. She persuaded Savile to come over after meeting him in an Italian restaurant in London. Through the late 1960s and 1970s, up to 40,000 people joined the broadcaster on sponsored walks through Dublin to raise money for the clinic.”

Fort Belvedere in Surrey, nearest village was Sunningdale in Berkshire was home to Prince Edward from 1929 – Extracts from wikipedia

“In 1929, the building became vacant, and was given to Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, by his father, King George V.[3] The king had originally expressed surprise at Edward’s request asking him “What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn weekends I suppose”, but then smiled and gave his permission.”

The relationship between Edward and Wallis Simpson blossomed at Fort Belvedere; the couple spent their first weekend at the fort at the end of January 1932, and by early 1935 two rooms had been combined at the fort for her use.[5][8] Notable interior decorators to work on the fort included Sybil Colefax, Lady Mendl, Maison Jansen, and Herman Schrijver.[9][10]Edward and Wallis entertained most weekends at the house; guests present included ‘courtiers and diplomats, American men of affairs and English Society, garnished with a sprinkling of statesmen, soldiers and sailors’.[5]Giles Gilbert Scott added a guest wing to the fort after Edward’s ascension as king in 1936.[9] In 1936 Wallis moved permanently to the fort after receiving threatening anonymous letters, and left Fort Belvedere for a final time on 3 December 1936, a week before Edward’s abdication.[5]

Cabinet Office files released in 2013 revealed that during December 1936, the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, had ordered the General Post Office to intercept Edward’s telephone communications between the fort and the European continent.[11] Government officials were caused further alarm by Edward’s habit of leaving his official ‘red boxes‘ unguarded around the fort.[12]

Following his abdication at the fort, Edward described himself as feeling ‘like a swimmer surfacing from a great depth…I left the room and stepped outside, inhaling the fresh morning air.’[5] Edward retained the visitor’s book from the fort, and it would grace all their subsequent homes.[9]“

Walter Monckton (b. 1891 – d.1965) had been at Balliol and taken the position of Attorney-General to the duchy of Cornwall in 1932, the year after turning 30. (b. 1891 – d.1965)

“In 1942 Monckton was Director-General of British Propaganda and Information Services in Egypt under Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State Resident in Cairo….

Anthony Eden appointed Monckton as his Minister of Defence in 1955. However, he was the only cabinet minister who disagreed with Eden’s policy during the Suez Crisis. Eden believed that if this dispute became common knowledge it would bring his government down. Therefore he managed to persuade Monckton not to resign and instead he became Paymaster General.”

During the early 1950s Peter Rawlinson joined Walter Monckton’s chambers (Guardian Obituary, 30 June 2006) and during 1962, a decade later, would be instructed as defence counsel for Sir Ian Horobin MP – the Conservative MP whose brief trial for the sexual assault of boys at his charitable youth club ‘Fairbairn’ on the Barking Road in the East End was scheduled to start just after Macmillan appointed Rawlinson as Attorney-General after his Night of the Long Knives – on which I explore more here [52 years on: The forgotten fly in the reshuffle]

Savile’s ‘Magical Passport’ to Le Touquet

Royal Picardie Hotel, Le Touquet, France

Valerie Monckton, as her father’s emissary, must have been able to access buildings and places not usually accessible to 18 year old debutantes in overtly conspicuous pink Morris Minors. Savile’s ‘Magical Passport’ he acquired at some point in 1945 has often returned to my mind when reading about emergency post-war trips to the mainland to retrieve incriminating papers or valuable artwork to consider if Savile’s cycling trips while young (Scottish highlands when he spots Glencoe circa 1944 and his trip to Le Touquet circa 1945) represented boasts about personal triumphs – getting a message through for his master as a dogged little envoy against all the odds perhaps?

“After labouring for two years at Waterloo colliery, and actually quite enjoying the life, I read one day that the cross-Channel ferries had started, with much celebration, the post war trips from Dover to Calais. The war was only just over and there was a great air of excitement about. We Bevin boys were to be demobbed just like the armed forces and I had two years to go. Freedom was too tempting, and mounting my bike, armed with a magical passport and £15 I cycled 300 miles to Dover.

There was considerable magic in this brave battered port, the English Channel and that mysterious land, low on the horizon, that only weeks before harboured hostile hordes.

My arrival on the recently raped shores of France was a pantomime. Speaking not a word of the language and having truly the first bicycle to cross into France since the war, the red tape was unbelievable. For three hours I stood on the dockside while officials harangued me, the bike and each other. Finally, because it was getting dark they produced that now familiar French way of life ‘the papers of permission to have a bicycle of foreign origin in France’. The papers came in the form of an indelible ledger that weighed all of three pounds that I had to tie across my saddlebag with rope!”

He sleeps overnight with 300 homeless in the roofless railway station at Calais Ville and nearing Le Touquet the next day witnesses a lorry get blown up by a mine. I wonder whether the ‘bicycle of foreign origin’ was yet his much beloved Oscar Egg bike? By 1945 Savile is 18, due to turn 19, so not a small child anymore.

“Le Touquet at its best is a fairytale place. Villas of the wealthy in colours and fancy dotted in clearings on the superb forest backcloth. Grotesque damage made them look like children’s toys smashed by some madman. The centre piece of all this was surely the most beautiful hotel ever built at that time, the Picardy. Perfect in proportion like the Taj Mahal, and built in stone of warm colours to blend with the sun’s rays and wooded

Le Touquet, September 1945

surrounds, it was for those who saw it a breathtaking building with an incredible atmosphere. I first saw it in the early evening light and thought it was a mirage. It looked immaculate and untouched, but as I freewheeled towards it and came out of the evening sun into its shadow it suddenly changed like in a Htichcock movie. Empty sightless windows peered down. The whole of the inside was shattered. No birds flew about it and the feeling of unreal macabre was overwhelming, like some gigantic tombstone.

That was all I needed and I turned and started slowly off for home pondering on the quite insoluble problem of how people can build things up then knock them down.” [As it Happens, Savile, 1974, pp.21 – 23]

Gone were the flower carnivals of the 1930s at Le Touquet

Something Savile would have to rely on Jersey for to in his later role as Mr Battle of the Flowers of the island.

From Anthony Blunt’s wikipedia entry:

According to the memoir of MI5 officer Peter Wright, Wright had regular interviews with Blunt from 1964 onwards for six years. Prior to that, he had a briefing with Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary, who told Wright: “From time to time you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace – a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national security.”[26]

Hermes, as the wing-footed Messenger of the Gods and emblem for the The Royal Corps of Signals has long been known as Jimmy so when you want to ensure your lines of communication during war remain intact or Comms are down and they need to be back up…well, call on the Signallers, Jimmies, and Jimmy’ll Fix It. Their motto was Certo Cito – Swift and Sure.

Jimmy Statues available to pay from Royal Signals shop online

“To be eleven years old and have the complete free run of the main dance hall of a wartime city that was headlined by one Sunday paper as ‘The City of Sin’ gave me an education that qualified me for every A Level that ever existed in Hell.

Not yet five feet in height, as thin as a drumstick, with big eyes, ears and nose, I was everyone’s mascot, pet, runner, holder of mysterious parcels and secrets. Because I didn’t understand the first thing about anything I was the confidant of murderers, whores, black marketeers, crooks of every trade – and often of the innocent victims they preyed on. I also played the drums.” [As it Happens, Savile, 1974, p.4]

I suspect Savile’s love of radio was never on the entertainment side, it had begun as a purely technical affair, as a fascination with the ability to eavesdrop.

“Quite honestly, I don’t think that my likes and dislikes are at all important, but when you are well-known (I don’t dig the word famous) I suppose people – in their time of – would be mildly interested in us types. If ever I get a crossed line on the phone I will listen right to the end of the other parties’ chat. I was once totally concerned about a shipment of ballbearings between two gentlemen and felt much refreshed after they had sorted it out. Analysing it later – a favourite hobby of mine, analysing – I worked it out that because I had, for a while, been pulled out of my own life into someone else’s I got back into my own skin a little richer, and rested, by the sharing. If you are reading these lines and I have caused you to slow the pace of your life, then that will suit me.” [God’ll Fix It, Savile, 1978/79 ‘Epilogue – Sort Of’, pp 62 – 63]

Being able to read messages others are unable to read or being able to read when others don’t think you capable of reading (Savile’s last interview with Alex Belfield talks of him reading telegrams to people aloud in the war who couldn’t read) gives both power to the messenger immediately in conveying the message accurately but also a longer-term value in keeping the secret. Why were Savile and Agnes ‘The Duchess’ on a motorbike in 1939? (incidentally Dan Davies notes that after Savile’s funeral it is a pub called The Duchess near Woodfield Cemetery, Scarborough calling drinkers in for their memories of Savile, the cemetery itself near Irton Moor, also known as a ‘Yorkshire spy base’ a long established comms point of national importance with GCHQ underground bases in the hill)

In 1965 the Prime Minister Harold Wilson opened the Butlin Tower (now called the British Telecommunications Tower, formerly the General Post Office Tower)

Although Savile liked to talk as if there was confusion over this in his autobiography of 1974

“Sitting in our super seafront flat one day she was holding forth to some of her lady pals. I was reading. One of the ladies had mentioned the Post Office Tower in London. ‘Oh yes,’ said the Duchess, ‘Jimmy opened that.’

Now it’s a known fact that the Queen took that particular job on. ‘No sweetheart,’ said I, ‘the Queen opened it. I just hold the record for running up the steps.’

(Some time previously I’d mentioned this particular feat to which the Duchess had replied at the time, over her eternal knitting, ‘You’ll hurt yourself doing silly things like that.’)

‘Nonsense,’ says she at this correction, ‘you told me you opened it.’ And then to explain to her friends my interruption she said, ‘He did really, ‘ adding the silencer of all time, ‘he forgets things you know.’

What could you do with an impossible girl like that other than lover her more than your own life?” [As it Happens, Savile, 1974, p.60]

It’s all about the Azimuths

Bizarrely in 1999 there has been some interesting work done by a chap called Richard Lamont here looking at whether there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest a government building which came onto the market for sale (and was therefore examined by buyers’ and their surveyors) was actually a secret radio tower built at Capenhurst, Cheshire and used by the government to intercept 1000s of trunk land lines running through Britain to Northern Ireland.

If you had a number of those structures dotted around performing those kind of functions (or dual functions, one being interception of comms) you’d need someone to be some kind of building caretaker presumably, fix them up or get maintenance in if something went wrong, do a big audit from Land’s End to John O’Groats when you can. It would have to be a job for someone who liked to travel, non-stop though and who’d want a job like that?

The history of Cragg Vale: Wesley & The Wilderness

Another of Savile’s favourite spots to return to a few times a year was Cragg Vale, near Hebden Bridge, in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, in the benefice of Erringden and the diocese of Wakefield. Reported to have been seen parked up in his camper van near the Hinchcliffe Arms, Savile returned 3 or 4 times a year, ostensibly in his role as Churchwarden of the Anglican church, although it appears he quite often took to the pulpit to preach sermons in such lurid outfits as pictured below. Certainly Savile was following in fine footsteps since John Wesley, a man whose legendary crowd command skills William Sargent dissected thoroughly in his 1957 Battle for the Mind, had preached nearby too. A website giving historical suggested walks for the area tells us where Wesley’s footsteps might be found on Cragg Road perhaps near Sutcliffe’s Wood named for Mr Sutcliffe’s family below: “So to the walk! Our route leads out of Mytholmroyd along the Cragg Road, passing Hoo Hole on the right, where, on Thurs 28th June 1770 John Wesley “rode to Mr. Sutcliffe’s at Hoo Hole, a lovely valley encompassed with high mountains. I stood on the smooth grass before his house which stands on gently rising ground, and all the people on the slope before me. It was a glorious opportunity. I trust they ‘came boldly to the throne’ and found grace to help in time of need.”

“I’ll tell you who used to go to speak at the church up there, it’s called St Johns in the Wilderness…he was a disc jockey, well-known – Jimmy Savile; he used to preach there, he knew the vicar or somebody and he used to come three or four times a year to speak there, yes. There were various things like that – there was once…a well known pianist, not a classical pianist but he was more of a swing, and he’d a finger less on each hand, and he used to come and play and he knew somebody that had the Hinchliffe Arms; he were well-known but the name forgets us for now; you know it was a strange place that they had Jimmy Savile preaching in the church. Tiny little place, yeh. And I lived up there for…till 1960, then I came here into this house 1966 and I daren’t tell you how much this house cost now!” [Harry Cummings, Wildrose Art http://www.wildrosearts.net/intervie…harry-cummings] (my underlining for emphasis – does this suggest Savile’s preaching began before 1967 and his appointment as Honorary Churchwarden was merely a step on the path to what? The keys to the church as Churchwarden? Savile did like to collect sets of keys everywhere he “touched base” if he could.)

Originally established as an Evangelical Anglican church St John the Baptist in the Wilderness was originally led by an anti-slavery campaigning cohort of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a man called Rev Thomas Crowther from 1821 – 1859, the church had broken away from the Parish of Halifax in 1844 in an assertion of complete independence. William Wilberforce had also become an Independent MP. Crowther was obviously a force to be reckoned with when it came to reforming the mill owners’ approach to any form of employee welfare or labour rights, as well as child labour. So in another twist along the path of getting to grips with Savile’s own peculiar belief system, it appears he was not only the “yok with the Yiddish Kop” as he liked to refer to himself, as well as a devout Catholic campaigning for the beatification of Margaret Sinclair his resurrecting Guardian Angel, but it appears he could also turn his hand to a spot of fervent evangelical Protestant proselytising should the circumstances require so.

Although Savile was to cement his links with the area more formally in 1967 by becoming the Honorary Churchwarden of St John the Baptist in the Wilderness church and appointing the Vicar there, his links to the area began in 1948 with a film called A Boy, A Girl and a Bike

“in the spring of 1948 a young and extremely fit Jimmy Savile appeared as an extra in the British film, starring Diana Dors and Honor Blackman. The story is based around a fictional cycling club, and Savile and a pal landed work and moved into digs in Grassington as the production moved between locations. The film climaxes in a prestigious Yorkshire road race, in which , for a second or two, the unmistakable figure of a 21 year old Jimmy Savile can be seen. He looks lean and healthy, and is pedalling his racing bike like the competitor that he surely was at the time.” [In Plain Sight, Dan Davies, Loc 1267]

At the time he was a member of the Leeds Olympic cycling club, and as a keen cyclist would go on to take part in the first Tour of Britain in 3 years’ time. Members of the Halifax Road Racing Club appeared as extras and Savile managed to get in on the action through friends at the Club.

“His lengthy TV career had its roots in Calderdale, with one of his first stints on screen in the 1947 film A Boy, A Girl And A Bike, about a fictional cycling club based in Hebden Bridge. Sir Jimmy, then a racing cyclist with Leeds Olympic Club, appeared as an extra alongside members of Halifax Road Racing Club”.

“Jimmy’s early love of cycling gave him his first screen appearance – as a film extra in the 1949 film A Boy, A Girl and A Bike, starring Diana Dors, Honor Blackman and Patrick Holt. It was filmed in West Yorkshire and only a few copies of it remain. It is centred on a love-triangle formed at a local cycle club and a dark-haired, 23 year old Jimmy makes a brief appearance as a cycling extra. Cyclist Martyn Bolt said: ‘In the 40s Jimmy was a rebel cyclist. He had joined a group called the British League of Racing Cyclists, which had been originally formed in 1942. They were a breakway organisation whose riders wanted to embrace a continental style of mass races on the open road. They rode in all black clothing and Jimmy embraced that kind of road racing.” [How’s About that then?, Alison Bellamy, Loc 2598]

The different years given for the filming in different quotes is of interest because it may be that Sir Bernard Ingham remembered the excitement over filming in the local area – as he would have been just starting out on his career before becoming Thatcher’s Press Secretary in later years, at the very bottom rung of the journalistic ladder – rookie 16 year old reporter on the Hebden Bridge Times circa 1948

Doug Petty, a fellow Tour of Britain team member of Savile’s who would later become professional and a top British cyclist, recalls in the Craven Herald January 2012:

“The film makers were looking for cyclists to take part and I got a call from Walter Greaves, the mile record-holder – he cycled with one arm – asking if I could get eight cyclists to take part. I did and included myself. I was working in a cycling shop at the time and could only get one day a week off but some of the cyclists did all the filming. They were paid £8 a week when the average salary was £5. It was great money. It was a fantastic time – I was in shots filmed in Skipton and Bolton Abbey and recall how when they wanted to film the sprint, the stars weren’t fit enough, so professionals took the parts and they superimposed the heads of the actors later.”

Raking in £250 a week as opposed to £150 per week (in today’s money) for possibly a month or more’s work means Savile would have been flush with cash for a while, close to his 22nd birthday. Maybe he purchased his famous Oscar Egg bike (this is where Savile’s self-created mythology appears to go all a bit Citizen Kane ‘Rosebud’ when he starts waxing gurglingly about that bike btw) at this point, if not with his father’s inheritance he was later left in 1953? I always wonder when and how he bought such a bike so early on. Maybe he invested his cash in business, whichever company he was ‘director’ of.

One thing he would have learnt through filming and watching the final result edited as the film was the ease with which heads could be superimposed on cinematic images.

Walter Greaves was a Bradford based one-armed cyclist, who was by then in his early 40s. In 1936, aged 29, Walter who’d had one arm amputated below the elbow when he was 14, had completed the endurance cycling record at the time. ‘Little Jim’ would have been 10 or so. Greaves was a member of the Airedale Cycling Club and as an outspokenly communist engineer who was 12 at the time of the great rally in Leeds of 1925, he found it difficult to get work, especially since he attempted to sign anyone up to the Youth Communism group as soon as getting into a conversation. From his Wikipedia profile he was viewed as a troublemaker in Leeds.

Reaching the heights at Stoodley Pike

As a cyclist Savile would have explored this area possibly while filming, but not least because Cragg Vale featured as a test of endurance being the start of the longest continuous gradients in England, rising 968 feet over an arduous 5.5 miles. Reading about the history of Cragg Vale and the merciless local millowners of the 1800s, the Hinchcliffes, and the high mortality rates of the children, who were often worked to death under the relentless charge of industrialisation and inhuman working conditions, images of Blake’s “dark satanic mills” are conjured up fairly easily. In the 1833 Commission report it was characterised as the ‘blackest’. From the Cragg Vale Community website

“At the height of the Industrial Revolution there were 11 prosperous mills in the Cragg Valley, employing a great number of the population, including children from as young as six, working in terrible conditions. In 1821, Rev Thomas Crowther became the first vicar of the newly built St John’s in the Wilderness of Cragg Vale. He was part of a group of Evangelical Anglican Clergy, who following on from their success in abolishing the slave trade under Wilberforce went on to tackle the terrible conditions in the factories. Until his death in 1859, he campaigned tirelessly to better the condition of those who worked in the surrounding mills of our community; in particular to reduce the long and gruelling hours worked by the children. He was subjugated to a campaign of harassment and insults from local mill owners, incensed by his criticisms. Following Rev Crowther’s death in November 1859, he was much mourned by “a grateful people” and his grave can be seen in St John’s churchyard. The carving on the road side of the tree trunk is intended as a tribute to Rev Thomas Crowther – on the left of the carving is a child mill worker in the foreground, with a mill chimney rising high behind. Thomas Crowther is represented as The Green Man, a representation of a face surrounded by or made from leaves. Why the Green Man? This character has been sculpted for centuries as wood or stone accepted as a symbol of new beginnings – appropriate here, Thomas Crowther offering the hand of freedom from the shackles of hard labour.”

“The Pennine Way proceeds to the ‘Public Slake Trough’ at Stoodley Spring, where, after a refreshing and well earned drink we head up the moor to the ‘Pike’ itself. Stoodley Pike Monument is dark, sullen and faintly Egyptian. On a sunny day it is distinguished and grey, but mostly it is moody and black. The wind howls unrelentingly up its winding staircase and whips viciously around its exposed viewing platform. On a winter’s day it chills to the bone. Some shelter may be obtained between its great buttresses, but this pallid delight tends to be marred by the annoyingly humanised sheep who mug you for your sandwiches! The present monument is the third (or possibly fourth) to be erected on this prominent site.

The first monument, a cairn of stones, was erected long ago, the last resting place of some ancient chieftain. His bones were reputedly discovered by workmen digging out the foundations for the first Pike in 1814. It has been suggested that the Pike once held a beacon, (certainly one was fired here for the 1988 Armada Celebrations!) At 1,310 ft above sea level, it would have made an ideal site. According to some sources, a building had been erected here before 1814, but whatever this might have been it was almost certainly demolished to make way for The First Pike.

This was erected by public subscription to commemorate the surrender of Paris to the Allies in March 1814. The completed Pike was 37 yds 2 feet 4 inches high. Although constructed on a square base about four yards high, it was predominently a circular structure, with a tapering cone at the top. The monument contained about 156 steps which ran precariously around the inside of the monument, quite innocent of any bannister rail! This was not an ascent for the giddy or faint hearted! After enduring this ordeal the visitor to the Pike might rest in a small room at the top of the pike which contained a fireplace, before plucking up courage for the even more unnerving descent. The career of the first pike was ill-fated and short lived. Then, as now, vandalism took its toll. Steps were removed and the place was generally wrecked. The authorities walled up the entrance up.

The final act in the saga took place on the afternoon of Wednesday the 8th February 1854, when the inhabitants of the whole area were unnerved by a rumbling sound resembling an earthquake. A glance at the skyline provided the answer:- the Pike had fallen down!! The collapse was attributed to the structure having been weakened by lightning, which had cracked the walls some years previously. The locals however, were believing none of this. By an unhappy co-incidence the Pike had fallen at the very moment when the Russian Ambassador left London before the declaration of war with Russia. The reason for the fall of the Pike was obvious:- it was an omen! Thus did Stoodley Pike find itself saddled with the myth that its collapse heralds the onset of war! The Pike did not stay ruined for long. On March 10th 1854, a meeting was held in the Golden Lion in Todmorden with the object of rebuilding it. Various meetings followed, and to cut a long story short, money was raised, an architect (Mr James Green) appointed, and work begun. The new Monument was erected further back from the edge of the hill than its predecessor, to avoid the storm erosion on the face of the moor which had weakened the base of the first Pike. The building contractor was Mr. Lewis Crabtree of Hebden Bridge. The present Pike can speak for itself. The massive, badly eroded inscription over the door was carved by Mr. Luke Fielden and, surrounded with masonic symbolism, it tells its story as follows:-STOODLEY PIKE A PEACE MONUMENT Erected by Public Subscription. Commenced in 1814 to commemorate the surrender of Paris to the Allies and finished after the battle of Waterloo when peace was established in 1815. By a strange coincidence the Pike fell on the day the Russian Ambassador left London before the declaration of war with Russia in 1854, and it was rebuilt when peace was proclaimed in 1856. Repaired and lightning conductor fixed. 1889.

Having said our farewells to the Pike, we follow the Pennine Way (and The Fielden Trail) along the ridge to the old Packhorse ’causey’ at Withens Gate. Here we turn left,(onto the Calderdale Way) and proceed a short distance to the ‘Te Deum ‘ Stone which hides coyly behind a wall.The face of this ancient stone, faintly reminiscent of a roman altar, is carved with the legend ’Te Deum Laudamus’:- “We praise thee O Lord!””

In Diana Dors’ autobiography Dors by Diana, at p. 77 in a chapter entitled Love Sweet Love she talks of filming at Hebden Bridge for A Boy, A Girl and a Bike. While filming she strikes a friendship with an actor she gets on very well with called Jimmy as if it could be Savile although ‘an almost fatherly interest’ from someone only 4 – 5 years one’s senior would be strange. Diana’s Jimmy, whether Savile or not, frees her mind from the sexual taboos which had been drilled into her:

“One of the actresses suddenly fell ill, but I could never discover the reason why she remained in bed so much. Or why, when we went to film inHalifax, the hotel manager there ordered her removal from the premises. Ralph and Meg Smart merely smiled when I innocently asked them what was going on and muttered something about her having a ‘bad migraine’. As I wasn’t too sure what that was, I figured I’d better stop enquiring. Quite why everyone was so secretive and treating the matter in such a peculiar way eluded me.Until finally an actor with whom I got on very well – he took an almost fatherly interest in me – explained that she had had an abortion on a recent visit to London and was trying to recover enough to cope with the rigours of filming. I was fascinated. The great problem of becoming pregnant had actually happened to someone at last. For my whole life up to then had consisted of everyone except me doing precisely what they wanted when it came to sex. I asked Jimmy, for that was this actor’s name, what I should do the next time I fell in love. Did men really think the worst of girl who slept with them? And was it really such a stigma, on one’s wedding night, not to be found a virgin? He was very patient and understanding, and in way he was the first person with whom I’d been able to discuss the mysterious world of sex. I had, of course, described my heartbreak over Guy, and it was a help when Jimmy carefully gave sensible explanations for what had been drilled into my mind as taboos.‘Things are not quite the same as they used to be, you know’, he smiled. ‘You’re going to have dozens of men in your life; play them along for whatever you want out of it.’ His words had new meaning, for suddenly sex was not a dirty word or a forbidden act until marriage. It was something of which to be unafraid and, above all, to enjoy, not endure.Perhaps if I could have talked before to someone like Jimmy I’d been spared all those months of frustration and fear. For here was a man of the world, almost urging me to go ahead and drink from the cup of life without inhibition. If his motives were ulterior, then he certainly never showed them to be so by making any kind of play for me.”

23rd February 1974: Actress Honor Blackman lends support to the Liberal Party as she joins Johnnie Savile, brother of broadcaster Jimmy and candidate for Battersea North, London, on a canvassing tour of the constituency.

Sure enough, the Wikipedia page for the Battersea North constituency reveals that a J. Savile stood there for the Liberal Party in the February 1974 general election. He finished third, polling 4683 votes. And a recent Daily Mail report suggests that Johnnie was no more pleasant than his brother. With regards to Diana Dors, Savile appears to have known her second husband sufficiently well to stop by LA, Beverly Hills, 16 years after first meeting and sometime before April 1964 when Savile visited Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker in California for 10 days for a second time:

“This habit can be quite unnerving to local residents and comedian Dickie Dawson, Diana Dors’ husband, who collected me in his Cadillac, never did quite get used to the idea of me starting to take off my shirt every time we stopped. Great guy that Dickie and he knows just about everybody in the film business. Beverly Hills claims to have the world’s most expensive homes, which is not surprising, because while I was there a 25 acre building plot was sold for $50 million. When I realised my room was costing me $20 a day I thought you could never get away with this in Salford” [How’s about that then?, Alison Bellamy, Loc 1379]

Two decades later Savile would formalise his reason to visit Cragg Vale as the church becomes vicarless in 1967 (for how long?) and Savile arrives to help the church find a vicar. He preaches a sermon at the church, dressed in a lurid yellow and acid green hooded gown with a pom pom brocade trim, an outfit which he digs out to wear once more in 2007. And on Boxing Day 1969 the Catholic Heraldpoint out Savile wasto feature twice in BBC programming for the day, conducting Songs of Praise from St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, Cragg Vale:

“Sunday, BBC-2: “End of a Decade.” 150-minute review with film and guests, including Cardinal Heenan, the Bonzo Dog Band, Archbishop Ramsey, Malcolm Muggeridge. The whole conducted by Jimmy Savile. Sunday, BBC-1: “Songs of Praise.”. Savile again, the Catholic in floral cassock, introduces carols sung by Anglicans of the Pennine village of Cragg Vale.”

In 1967 Savile became Honorary Churchwarden of St John in the Wilderness at Cragg Vale, despite the fact he had only come to the church to help fix a job for a vicar as reported in the Halifax Courier:

“I first came down here to help the church find a vicar and soon after was appointed church warden for my efforts.”

Who had asked Savile down to find a vicar in the first place? And who appointed him Honorary Churchwarden?

In 1960 Rev. David Bennett was ordained and the following year he joined the Victory Lodge in Halifax as a freemason, going on to become one of the most decorated Freemasons in the county of Nottingham in his later career

Having been appointed as ‘Priest in Charge’ of St John the Baptist in the Wilderness in 1967 Rev. Bennett was to eventually have a 25 year long working relationship with Jimmy Savile in youth support and development.

“Sir Jimmy began fund-raising there in 1967 when his friend, the Rev David Bennett, enlisted his help to raise £8,000 for a new vicarage. The veteran presenter returned regularly to lead 10-mile sponsored walks in aid of the church and other good causes in Calderdale until the late 1970s” (St John’s mourns for honorary church warden Sir Jimmy Savile Halifax Courier – 01 November 2011)

2014: Support for CSA Inquiry from Craig Whittaker MP for Calder Valley is crucial

In 2014 one of the first Conservative MPs to sign up to back the call to the Home Secretary Theresa May to launch a CSA Inquiry as requested here by 7 original MPs was Craig Whittaker MP for Calder Valley who published this letter in the Halifax Courier a few weeks after the Savile: Exposure programme on ITV.

“Talking Politics: So where are all the letters about kids’ safety?

How did Jimmy Savile get away with the abuse for so many years? By Craig Whittaker, Conservative MP for the Calder Valley Published on Monday 29 October 2012 20:45 A badger is cute but a child is more important. Each week we receive emails and letters about animals. Sometimes we receive hundreds of emails during particular campaigns. This last fortnight we have recieved over 250 emails and letters about badgers. Other notable ones have been on Cayman turtle farms; circus animals; stray dogs; animal testing; and who could forget the beak trimming of hens. As Britons, we love our animals but do we love our children as much? What I find incredulous is when there are serious safeguarding issues with children, suprisingly I get no communication from my constituents at all. The allegations around Jimmy Savile highlight that point. Not one email from a constituent. Surprising in itself because there were many years in Jimmy Savile’s life that he spend right here in the Calder Valley around Cragg Vale. How on earth can this level of abuse be allowed to continue for so many years with what appeared to be known or suspected by many people and it just swept under the carpet! Staggering! Some of this abuse hadnot taken place 50 or so years ago, some of it happened in the last decade. How can such a high profile celebrity get away with sexual abuse for so many years with so many people and no action taken? Every month I deal with some kind of child abuse whether physical or sexual through my office or surgeries and whilst I accept these are not public cases, we have a huge issue in this country, even in 2012, of children being abused. One explanation is given by Dr. Judith Herman from Harvard University who says, ‘The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness’. Apparently this is a very normal human response that often feeds decision makers cultural disbelief and high level political indifference to sexual violence victim/survivor support needs (being seen as too complex a social issue to deal with). Victims of sexual crime are a very large, but also very hidden, and currently a relatively silent community of interest in the UK. Dr. Herman also highlights that the study of psychological trauma has a curious history – one of episodic amnesia. Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion.Let’s hope with the high profile case of Jimmy Savile and for the sake of children nationally that now we have a period of active investigation and we do not slip back into a period of oblivion. I also can’t help but feel that if the plight of children nationally was as high up in people’s priorities as our love for animals, then perhaps we would have a much better society where we all could live. Sadly, the silence in this area is often deafening.”

Following on from some brief mentions of Egypt in two previous posts Savile: Loyal and Ancient Shepherd of the Empire, and British Israelites, the Hill of Tara and the Ark of the Covenant, – Egypt, as the scene of the Exodus of the Israelites led by Pharaoh’s ‘adopted’ son turned traitor Moses, features heavily in British Israelite mythology, along with Pyramids or specifically the Great Pyramid as having been built by the Israelites as slaves, where they have according to various myths and bad archaeology left their Britisher future inheritors clues as to their destiny as God’s Chosen People. As Mairead Carew asks in her book on Tara and the Ark of the Covenant (and I will post more about):What was the “Great Irish-Hebraic-cryptogramic hieroglyph” and the Freemason connection? Whatever-it-is-it-sounds-kinda-complicated. The kind of thing you’d need an expert Egyptologist to look into for you, if you had one to hand. Throughout Alison Bellamy’s Authorised biography of Jimmy Savile, asterisked/bullet point factoids appear at the end of each chapter, one of which caught my eye:

“In total Jimmy had 31 nieces and nephews. His sister Marjory, an expert in Egyptology who travelled the world, had 14 children, 12 of whom survived.” (Loc 2336)

Savile’s second eldest sister Marjorie (or Marjory depending on who was doing the spelling) was about twelve or so when Jimmy, her youngest of 3 brothers was born. In 1922, four years before Savile’s birth, the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb had renewed the enthusiasm for all things Ancient Egyptian that had swept the empire ever since Napoleon’s 1798 Mediterranean campaign so it is perhaps unsurprising many an amateur archaeologist was inspired during this period in particular. How one gets to be an expert Egyptologist is another matter entirely? It does appear Marjorie went to college. Unlike his siblings Savile, according to his sister Joan, did not get to go to College:

“We all went to college but when it came to [his] turn the money had run out.” [Loc 663 In Plain Sight]

and Joan also recalled Savile’s outlook to his siblings as different,

“Maybe it was because he was a delicate child, ” she offered. ‘Maybe it’s because children who have been snatched from the jaws of death lead a charmed life.” [Loc 691, In Plain Sight, Sunday Times Magazine, 2 August 1992]

For more on this as a belief here’s the good old Daily Mail only in January 2014 with ‘The Children who have near-death experiences – and then lead charmed lives‘. Savile’s contributions to the campaign for Margaret Sinclair’s beatification (the dead nun Savile’s mother had prayed to and is credited with the miracle of bringing him back as a child from his near-death experience), adoption of her as his Guardian Angel, and Sinclair’s own history contained in various Catholic pamphlets suggest a less than shy and retiring campaigner for workers’ rights in various factories she worked in post WWI (Waverley Cabinet Works & McVities) prior to her death in 1925. Margaret Sinclair represents a whole other angle into Savile’s ‘belief system’, to be explored in another post. Back to Marjory, the amateur expert Egyptologist:

“Marjory Marsden, Guy’s mother, idolised her youngest brother, thanks in no small part to the fact he would occasionally turn up at the Seacroft estate in Leeds carrying a colour television or a new telephone under his arm. As a result, the Marsdens were one of the first families on the estate to own either. But according to Guy, his father, Herbert Marsden, ‘couldn’t stand [Jimmy Savile], he absolutely hated him … hated him with a vengeance.’ (In Plain Sight, Dan Davies, Loc ?)

It was Marjorie’s son Guy, aged 13, who had run away to Euston, London during 1967 to be picked up by a group of men always on the lookout for ‘runaways’ or ‘chickens’ as they liked to call the ‘fresh meat’ for the ‘rack’ (also known as The Wimpy – Piccadilly Circus had always been alluring to men like Abraham Jacob and Charles Hornby loitered, trading runaway children for sex):

The Dilly Boys, Mervyn Harris, 1973

“About four days later’, Jimmy Savile turned up at the flat where they were staying. ‘He recognised me and I thought “this is it, I’m going to get in big trouble here”. I hadn’t been in touch with my parents to tell them where I was. But Uncle Jimmy just took us away to a much better place.’ Savile turned up by coincidence at the address because he mixed with ‘fellow child molesters’, said Guy. The group of runaways ended up in a fabulous house – believed to belong to a famous pop impresario – with a big indoor swimming pool. The celebrity home was one of the party venues.” (Uncle Jimmy took me to his sick parties, Daily Mail, 5 October 2012)

“His sister turned a blind eye to his abuse of her granddaughter, it was ­claimed.Caroline Robinson, 49, said Savile, her great-uncle, twice sexually assaulted her as a young girl – aged 12 and again when she was 15. She said that even today the smell of cigar smoke “makes my flesh crawl”. But she said close family members who knew, including her grandmother Marjorie Marsden would be bribed with lavish gifts in return for keeping quiet. Caroline said: “Uncle Jimmy gave Marjorie everything she wanted. She was interested in Egyptology so he bought her a house on the Nile. He paid for the best lawyer for her divorce. He paid for her to live in a smart BUPA care home near his flat in Roundhay Park in Leeds before she died in 2006. “She had private medical insurance and a cottage in Llandudno, courtesy of Jimmy. “He bought her a caravan on the coast there. If Marjorie had blabbed, Jimmy would have had nothing. No fame, no money. In fact, he’d have been in jail. And Marjorie would have had nothing too. “What Jimmy did to me was terrible. But the most unsettling thing of all is that Grandmama, whom I loved dearly, knew exactly what was going on and she kept her mouth shut because Jimmy paid for her ­silence. She always referred to him as her ‘next of kin’. The camp that has closed ranks and kept silent about all this are those who have benefited financially from him.” (Jimmy Savile and the IRA, by Jimmy Saville, 20 October 2012, The Mirror)

For a man who was notoriously miserly to friends and family Savile’s generosity to Marjorie in her pursuit of her Egyptology studies seems out of character, apart from in the context of the wealth of gifts he was showering her with anyway. The family dynamics between Mary (eldest sister) and Joan (third eldest sister) are visible in Savile’s This is Your Life with Michael Aspel “Not a Word! Ooh you’ve done me! She’s done me good this time!” For a short while Savile stands poised with his fist near his eldest sister Mary’s face (14 years older than he), in a Bruce Lee 1-inch punch pose menacing her to be silent. Mary treats it as the opportunity to get something out of Savile which they both appear to agree will be the case. Jokingly. Marjory however is absent from the introductions and isn’t mentioned as being in the audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4rIQbyxg0

On how to divine prophecy using the Pyramid Inch

Taylor in turn influenced the Astronomer Royal of Scotland Charles Piazzi Smyth, F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., who made numerous numerological calculations on the pyramid and published them in a 664-page book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1864) followed by Life, and Work in the Great Pyramid (1867). These two works fused pyramidology with British Israelism and Smyth first linked the hypothetical pyramid inch to the British metric system.[9]

This diagram from Charles Piazzi Smyth‘s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1864) shows some of his measurements and chronological determinations made from them

Smyth’s theories were later expanded upon by early 20th century British Israelites such as Colonel Garnier (Great Pyramid: Its Builder & Its Prophecy, 1905), who began to theorise that chambers within the Great Pyramid contain prophetic dates which concern the future of the British, Celtic, or Anglo-Saxon peoples. However this idea first originated with Robert Menzies, an earlier correspondent of Smyth’s.[10]David Davidson with H. Aldersmith wrote The Great Pyramid, Its Divine Message (1924) and further introduced the idea that Britain’s chronology (including future events) may be unlocked from inside the Great Pyramid. This theme is also found in Basil Stewart’s trilogy on the same subject: Witness of the Great Pyramid (1927), The Great Pyramid, Its Construction, Symbolism and Chronology (1931) and History and Significance of the Great Pyramid… (1935).

Despite Petrie Flinders’ (a respected Egyptologist, whose father was also a British Israelite) thorough debunking of Piazzi Smyth’s notion of a Pyramid inch (1860s) within 20 years of it first being published, any number of British Israelites in the various friendly societies, freemasonry lodges, and protestant evangelical movements had already seized upon the concept gleefully with its promise of predicting the future based on the application of the ‘pyramid inch’. British Israelites’ obsessional desire to prove a divine contract for themselves and a divine origin for their monarchy all for the greater good (and justification) of the Empire didn’t permit them to undo any good work they’d done interpreting as much as they could to confirm they were indeed the chosen people. Even as recently as 1971 Captain E. Raymond published ‘The Great Pyramid Decoded’ claiming it foretold the date of the Exodus when the Israelites would escape bondage and of Christ’s crucifixion.

Savile and his ‘moment of enquiry’ at Qumran, site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

One imagines the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls between 1946 – 1956 was also a time of great excitement for the British Israelites, keen to find out whether the scrolls, as with every other artefact of antiquity they examined, could be persuaded to confirm their greatness too. Savile wants to make it clear he gets some alone time at Qumran, near the Dead Sea and the site of the discovery of the scrolls in the chaos of WWII, during his Jim’ll Fix It Holy Land Christmas Special filmed in December 1976.

“There are times when I’ve felt God very close by me. When I was in the Holy Land, I never felt the need to go into a church because I was far too concerned with being in the wilderness. Now in the wilderness, down by the Dead Sea and at the place where the Good Samaritan looked after the chap who had been set upon by the robbers, I wanted to be on my own and I very much wanted to be with the stillness, with the quietness. I went down, early in the morning, to the area by the Dead Sea where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was able to stand about, before the heat of the day, and look around. I was mightily pleased at that moment; I was able to be in the same area where Jesus Christ had walked and lived and worked out his mental application to the world. That gave me a chance to work out my mental application to the world in exactly the same way as he did. I weighed up form as he might have weighed up form; and I came to certain decisions as he must have come to certain decisions. That was a particularly religious moment. It was rather like totting up the score of life. I tried to see whether I had gone right or whether I had gone wrong in specific instances. Generally, however, I felt I was facing in the right direction; at least I was not marching towards the forces of evil. I was wobbling in between the white lines a little bit, but coming back, as it were. I did not feel at all self-satisfied. It was just a moment of enquiry, a religious moment.” (God’ll Fix It, Jimmy Savile, published 1979, p.34)

While I hear echoes of Jesus wandering the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights (now known as Lent) there’s no mention of wandering days on end from Savile, quite the opposite in a moment of enquiry he was looking for a sign. Although any mention of ‘wilderness’ reminds me Savile was the Honorary Churchwarden at the Anglican St John the Baptist in the Wilderness at Cragg Vale, near Halifax.[ Savile, St John’s in the Wilderness, Cragg Vale and Hebden Bridge post here]. It appears that at Qumran Savile finds some confirmation that he, in the same physical location as he imagines Jesus to have been, is “not marching towards the forces of evil.” Hmmm…maybe he should have glanced over his shoulder to check which side he thought he was leading in that case?

World Summary: Raiders find scroll

Times, The (London, England) – Monday, December 1, 1986

Author: From IAN MURRAY, JERUSALEM

An old leather manuscript, possibly part of a 2,000-year-old Dead Sea scroll, was found in a police raid in Bethlehem during investigations into a fraud case (Ian Murray writes). Experts believe that 30 or more of the Dead Sea scrolls, which were hidden in caves near the monastery of the Essene sect at Qumran around AD70, have been hidden away since their discovery nearly 40 years ago.

Dead Sea scrolls dispute may be settled by science

Times, The (London, England) – Tuesday, March 27, 1990

Author: Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent

THE Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the greatest surviving archives of the Holy Land, are soon to be carbon-dated, more than 40 years after their discovery in desert caves in Palestine. It is hoped that the dating process will help settle a dispute among scholars that places the scrolls at two different times nearly four centuries apart. Since the scrolls include the earliest known texts of some of the books of the Bible, the dating process will prove to be of interest to Christians, Muslims and Jews alike, and may settle the question of whether the Essenes, a mysterious sect living in ancient Palestine, held “Christian” beliefs centuries before the birth of Christ. Nearly 800 papyrus and leather scrolls have survived, and Mr Magen Broshi, a custodian of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, where some of the documents are on display, said at least a dozen would be dated. Some experts believe they were written after the birth of Christ by his early followers in Palestine. But the majority of biblical scholars believe that the scrolls date to the second or third century BC and were written by the esoteric Essene sect. Professor Geza Vermes, a professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, said yesterday that it was believed that the scrolls were a collection of documents hidden in about AD66 to 70 during the first large Jewish revolution against the Romans.“I would greatly welcome any greater precision in dating these scrolls,” said Professor Vermes. “However, the carbon-dating will not necessarily solve the problem once and for all because the documents were compiled over centuries, most written in 300BC and others only completed in the first century AD.” The dating has been thought necessary because of the claim by critics, such as Professor Robert Eisenman, of California State University, that the unpublished scrolls were the product of early Christian groups. He and his colleagues believe that certain phrases commonly used in the early Church, together with what they interpret as cryptic references to Herod the Great prove the later dating. Although none of the scrolls has been carbon-dated before, part of the linen wrappings of one was dated more than 30 years ago. It gave an age of AD33 plus or minus 200 years, too imprecise to be of use.The new investigation, employing a technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry, will require a piece of parchment only the size of a postage stamp and may give a result accurate to within 50 years. The Israel Antiquities Authority expects work to begin at a laboratory in Europe within weeks. In Switzerland, Professor Willy Woelfli, of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said he would be prepared to date the scrolls so long as he could direct the operation.

Dead Sea scrolls `kept secret’

Times, The (London, England) – Tuesday, November 13, 1990

Author: Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent

SCHOLARS wanting to study the Dead Sea scrolls claim they are being denied access to the texts, considered vital to understanding the birth of Christianity. The protests have forced the Harvard professor in charge of publication into setting deadlines for his team, after 40 years in which the scrolls have been kept from many specialists who would find them useful. The argument, which has simmered in the academic community for years, became public earlier this year, when Oxford university was given a complete set of photographs of the texts, but only on condition that access was restricted to those approved by Professor John Strugnell of Harvard. Professor Geza Vermes, who is in charge of the Oxford archive, says in Scientific American that he and scores of his colleagues have tried to gain access for years, without any response. Professor Strugnell says in the same journal that any competent scholar can see the scrolls, and that of about ten requests a year, five were serious. He describes Professor Vermes as “competent in other things, but he doesn’t have the necessary technical skills”. Further allegations of suppression of the scrolls have come from the Jesuit scholar Joseph A. Fitzmyer, who compiled a concordance of all the texts 30 years ago, and Herschel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, who claims that the concordance has been kept secret for years in case anybody used it to create an unpublished scroll. Professor Norman Golb, of the University of Chicago, claims that Professor Strugnell and his colleagues are reluctant to release documents until they can reconcile them to the theory that they were produced by the Essene sect. Professor Golb believes them to be simply a cache of assorted texts hidden when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, and says that at least one unpublished text supports his view. Professor Strugnell and Elisha Qimron of Ben-Gurion university will publish this 112-line manuscript with a commentary next year, and Professor Strugnell says all his documents may be published in ten years. Source: Scientific American 263 No. 5: 36-38.

By the time Savile was born pyramidology had become a firm feature of British Israelite belief, with a number of books published stating a key existed to enable the prediction specifically of Britian’s chronology, past and future, particularly in a flurry of publishing with four books by different authors appearing between 1924 – 1935. As it happens, Savile was keen for others to tell us that he and/or his mother had friends in Cairo from around 1926 at the time of his birth – the Raouf-Cottrell family – living very near the Pyramids and whose daughter would marry an Egyptian revolutionary, providing Savile with the means to insinuate he had access to a man who was later to become the Egyptian President for 11 years.

Cottrell, Cotrell, Cotrill, or Cottrill?

“A friend of Jimmy’s, Manchester businessman Benny Sternberg who has since died, revealed that Jimmy had been approached to explore the possibility of a meeting between Sadat and Begin because of his friendship with the family of the Egyptian president’s wife Jehan. She was the daughter of a Sheffield-born woman, the late Gladys Cottrell whom Jimmy knew well. When approached, much like he was with royalty, Jimmy always refused to confirm the story. But Mr Sternberg insisted that it was the case.” (How’s About That Then? Alison Bellamy Loc 2142) “Savile had once boasted to the Jewish Telegraph newspaper that the Friends of Israel connection and the filming for Jim’ll Fix It were merely a cover for the real purpose of his visit. He claimed he had been invited by Israeli president Ephraim Katzir to advise on matters of national security.” (In Plain Sight, Dan Davies, loc 4817)

Gladys, Jean and Safwat

Jehan Sadat’s autobiography, wife of Egyptian President 1970 – 1981, published in 1987

Jehan Sadat (born 1933), who until aged 11 thought her name is Jean while attending her Christian Missionary school just outside Cairo, grows up with her Egyptian Muslim ‘Pharaonic’ father Safwat, a physician and her Christian mother, Gladys and her three brothers. Later she meets Anwar Sadat when fifteen, they marry when she is 15 years 9 months old and he is 31, and as President of Egypt from 1970 – 1981 she is the First Lady of Egypt until his assassination in 1981.

“The mother of the world”, the historian Ibn el-Khaldun had called Cairo in the fourteenth century. As a child growing up in Roda, it was easy to see why. Everywhere were the signs of Cairo’s rich past. Directly across the Nile to the east was Coptic Cairo, which for more than fifteen hundred years had been the center of Egyptian Coptic art and religion. On my way to School I could see the spires of the fourth-century Abu Serga Church, built on the spot where it is believed the family of Jesus stayed during their flight into Egypt. Beyond Abu Serga, I could sometimes make out the thin Ottoman minarets of the Alabaster Mosque, built by Muhammad ‘Ali in the nineteenth century. Still farther along was the Old City founded by the Fatimids in 973, and el-Azhar Mosque and University. El-Azhar is the oldest university in the world, and attracts more than 100,000 students from countries as far away as Mauritania and Indonesia. All who come are students of Islam, for although el-Azhar is old, our religion is still young and growing. From the other side of Roda, I could look across the Nile to the west and see the river gardens of the rich merchants who lived in Giza, beyond to the campus of Cairo University, and to the Pyramids Road, which if followed to the end, terminated at the Farafra Oasis in the Libyan Desert. On a clear day when no dust or sand blew, I could make out the tips of the Great Pyramids themselves.” (A Woman of Egypt, Jehan Sadat, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, p.36-37)

“Often my father would take us for drives out of Cairo into the countryside , to the Pyramids just ten minutes away in the Sahara, or to celebrate our many religious rituals and secular holidays.” (Sadat, p.47)

Modern Egypt and Thebes, John Gardner Wilkinson, published 1843, p.284

The Isle of Roda has according to tradition been known as the spot where the Pharaoh’s daughter found the Israelite baby Moses who grew up to be a Pharaoh and would lead his people from Egypt in the Exodus – as illustrated below from The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom, an American BI publication (Vol VIII 1 July 1925, Issue 13 Journeying to the Holy Land – Part III) and it also contained the Nilometer which was the marker of many a celebration related to the Nile flooding.

John Lanchester’s new book ‘How to Speak Money‘ has an extremely pertinent observation about location and access to Nilometers

“As late as 1810, thousands of years after the nilometers had entered use, foreigners were still forbidden access to them. Added to accurate records of flood patterns dating back centuries, the nilometer was an essential tool for control of Egypt. It had to be kept secret by the ruling class and institutions, because it was a central component of their authority.” (p.4)

“My father, Safwat Raouf, had met my mother, Gladys Charles Cotrell, in 1923 in Sheffield, England, where he was studying medicine at the University of Sheffield, England, and she was a music teacher. Their love was very strong from the beginning. It had to be, for a marriage had already been arranged in Cairo between my father and his cousin. “No one in our family has ever married a foreigner,” my grandfather wrote to my father in England. “I will not give you permission to marry this Englishwoman.” (Sadat, p.37) [note the spelling of Cotrell by her daughter – Savile spells it differently]

It’s unknown whether Safwat’s father knew his son’s intended, the 19/20 year old music teacher (Gladys was born in 1904), was already six months pregnant with his first grandson, Magdi when she and Jehan’s father from Upper Egypt (hence the term Pharaonic) tied the knot in what is now Nick Clegg’s constituency of Ecclesall:

“On 2 September 1924, at Ecclesall Bierlow in the county of Derby (UK), Safwat Raouf, a 25 year-old medical student at Sheffield University, married music teacher Gladys Cotterill, the daughter of Charles Henry Cotterill, a Sheffield City police superintendent. Three months later their first born son Magdi was born in Liverpool. Jehan was born in Egypt in August 1933.” [www.egy.com archive: from a March 2005 article by Samia Raafat, which states ‘this article was plagiarized in part or in total in several Egyptian and regional newspapers + Gezira International TV’ suggesting much better sources for biographies of Egypt’s First Ladies are available in Arabic] “My mother and father were married in a civil ceremony in England, and when my father returned home with my mother three years later it was with my brother, who had been born in Liverpool.” (Sadat, ibid p.38) “For thirty years she did not return to England, and when she did she could not recognize the streets or even find her family house in Sheffield. To locate her family, my mother put a notice in the local newspaper, saying what hotel she was staying in. That afternoon her only living sister and other relatives rushed to see her.” (Sadat, p.39) “It was in Upper Egypt that Jehan’s father Ahmed Raouf started his career as a director in the Public Health Department.” [www.egy.com archive as above]

Jehan Sadat’s autobiography ‘A Woman of Egypt’ suggests her parents, the Raouf/Cotrell family, left Liverpool, England around 1927, the time ‘Little Jim’, the last of Agnes’ seven children had just been born 2 days before her 40th birthday, a fact which only Dan Davies has picked up on does not feature in any of Savile’s ‘not again’ child stories of being the last-born. However, on Gladys Cotrell’s return to Sheffield in the mid 1950s Savile would have been in his late twenties/just turned 30 and by this point her daughter Jehan had married Sadat in 1949, who would have already played his role as one of the senior Free Officers responsible for deposing King Farouk in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. One can only imagine what Gladys’ old friends and family thought of her and her daughter’s adventures and due to the timing of her arrival in England (although very vague) I also have to wonder whether the events of the Suez Crisis of 1956 played any part in Gladys’ decision to return home for the first time since leaving?

Christian Missionary Schools and Hospitals in Egypt

Mohammed Fayed’s recent offer to Scotland should they become independent (The Scotsman, 19 January 2014) of a giant statue of his claimed ancestor, a Princess Scota (on a *reasonable* plinth, no one wants to look immodest) interested me because it appears, that like Jean Cotterill/Jehan Sadat, Fayed attended a British Christian Missionary school in Egypt rich in British Israelite teachings and heritage judging by what he was being taught about Princess Scotia/Scota.

The Scotsman, 19 January 2014

1898: British Israelites Egypt General Mission / Shebeen Hospital

Robin Bryans, The Dust has never settled, p14

Robin Bryans in The Dust Has Never Settled keeps returning to the great occasion of 1898 in Belfast when seven of Richard ‘Dickie’ Bryans (Robin’s grandfather) young friends establish the British Israelite ‘Egypt General Mission’, setting off for Cairo. As a child growing up in 1930s Belfast, Donegall Avenue, he had enjoyed the Mission’s ‘Magic Lantern’ showing scenes from Egypt as entertainment. Bryans takes care to point out that there were plenty of poor, starving and sick in Belfast’s slums to justify targeting help at home and not Egypt.

Dr Mary Wills would join the Shebeen Hospital as a missionary doctor, serving there during the war and her mother would fund sending the 16 year old Robin to Barry Evangelical College, where Ian Paisley had trained to much applause for his preaching, in the hope Bryans would accompany her daughter out in Egypt. The wealthy Welsh Wills family it appears had become infused with the British Israelite spirit as divine confirmation of their greatness, as did many other Welsh and non-Welsh industrialists of the age.

All raising the question of a British Israelite-style Trojan Horse effort in terms of what the ‘Egypt General Mission’ was actually up to and whether and which schools were established in Cairo and Alexandria teaching generations of Egyptian children British-Empire supporting myths during 1890s – 1940s?

At the very least, while oscillating violently between philosemitism and anti-semitism in its attitude to the ‘other’ ‘Chosen People’, the British Israelite myth has been extremely adaptive and flexible demonstrating the strength of an empire can lay in its ability to absorb and include peoples into an overarching narrative so that they feel they belong, so completely, that even their original identity is usurped.

Did Savile receive an invitation in 1975 to meet President Sadat in Cairo?

And more to the point, did he go?

‘Whether or not he had any part in the historic 1977 meeting between Begin and Sadat – and he did later claim to have attended the Egyptian embassy in June 1975 to discuss ‘a VIP invitation to meet President Sadat in Cairo’ – something truly momentous happened on Jimmy Savile’s trip to the Holy Land.” (Dan Davies, Loc 4846) (Daily Mirror, 25 June 1977)

Savile never really displayed an interest in Egypt like his sister Marjorie, and certainly not as he did with Israel writing about his trip to Israel in 1979’s God’ll Fix It. Dan Davies, in In Plain Sight, tells us that in December 1976, after the success of series one of Jim’ll Fix It a Christmas Special was commissioned. As it happens, Savile had been invited by the Friends of Israel Educational Trust on a 10-day trip round Israel and coincided it with taking a nine year old boy from Liverpool who’d written asking to see where baby Jesus was born. Savile was known for supporting charities in Israel the Women’s International Zionist organisation (now responsible for running nurseries etc) and the British Friends of the Laniado Hospital in Netanya. This hospital started raising funds in 1975 along with its American Friends too and is according to Wikipedia notable for two ways in which it operates: (1) It follows the Torah in all running and management of the hospital including healing; and (2) Anti-Strike Contractual Clause: None of the staff are allowed to strike because the man who established it said that wasn’t in line with their religious dedication to healing so everyone has this written into their contract that they’re not allowed to strike. I’m not sure Margaret Sinclair, (whose reputation incidentally is now forever shackled to the ‘miracle’ of resurrecting one of the world’s most prolific and predatory child rapist necrophiliacs so that he could walk among us) with her unique brand of trade unionistic Roman Catholic employee welfare would have agreed God sides with employers, even in a hospital context – but as a religious reason for restricting strike action I wonder whether Savile and Thatcher ever spoke about putting one’s duty to God above the right to strike? If Britishers were truly Israelites maybe they’d have to reconsider where their loyalties should lie…but presumably only if Thatcher’s particular brand of Methodism had also become infused with the British Israelite divine patriotism?

Sir Ian Horobin MP, Laurens Van Der Post Will Black’s recent article for his Huffington Post blog here asks whether Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle wasn’t more window dressing designed to distract from the ongoing pressure on the Palace of Westminster to take itself seriously as just another institution under investigation for child abuse allegations? 52 years earlier on the same date, 13th July, Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister, culled one third of his Cabinet. Remarkably, at the time of the reshuffle, a resolutely unremorseful Sir Ian Horobin MP (Con. Oldham East) was due to stand trial five days later for a number of indecent assaults on teenage boys during 1958-1961 as reported in The Times on 16 May 1962. Horobin, aged 31 had briefly been Conservative MP for Southwark for a term between the wars (1931 – 1934) and didn’t return to politics until 6 years after the war in 1951 as MP for greater Manchester constituency Oldham East. We get a taste for Horobin’s enthusiasm in a letter to the Editor of The Times written 10 years before his conviction:

“May I intervene in the correspondence about research into youth work? My only qualification is 30 years’ slogging hard work in one small corner of that field. I do so to say heaven preserve us from any more inquiries…”

Somewhat ironic in the context of Theresa May’s recent capitulation to calls for an overarching inquiry. Three years after this letter Horobin received a knighthood for his good works with East End boys. Five days after the reshuffle, on 17 July 1962 Sir Ian Horobin pleaded guilty to a number of indecent assaults on boys at the Fairbairn Boys’ Club in Plaistow. Here he had lived in a bedsit above the dining room on the premises, despite being an MP in a Greater Manchester constituency for ten years. Someone who did rather well out of Macmillan’s reshuffle was Peter Rawlinson, a QC and Conservative MP for Epsom in Surrey, and at the time engaged as Horobin’s defence counsel, against Mervyn Griffiths for the Crown.

Sir Peter Rawlinson (Solicitor General under Macmillan 1962-1964; Attorney General under Ted Heath 1970-74; Attorney General for Northern Ireland 1972-1974)

In his autobiography, A price too high, published in 1989, Rawlinson’s Prologue details how the day before Horobin was due in court to, Rawlinson was summoned by Macmillan to be offered the position of Solicitor General. Rawlinson asks 48 hours grace to undertake an ‘unusually distasteful’ task of completing Horobin’s defence. Supermac, appearing to have forgotten any headlines reporting the case, asks why Horobin hadn’t the decency to do a runner like Willie Beauchamp, presumably referring to William Lygone, 7th Earl of Beauchamp, former leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords and Governor General of New South Wales (supposedly the model for Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited).

“The following day I performed my ‘unusually distasteful’, and extremely difficult, task. My client had at one time wanted me in my speech in mitigation of his offences to impress upon the judge that in the East, when a city had been stormed and sacked, it was not only the girls who were raped. Then he wanted me to say that often the boys he had seduced in their youth had later brought their own sons to join the club, so where was the harm? Again I suggested that this line might not altogether appeal to the sentencing judge. In the event the trial lasted only a few hours. Sir Ian pleaded guilty and was sentenced, as he had been warned, to a substantial term of imprisonment.” (A Price Too High, Peter Rawlinson, p.5)

Daily Express, 14 April 1962

Daily Mirror 4 June 1962

“A 15-year old boy told the court that after he joined the boys’ club at the age of 11, Sir Ian asked if he collected foreign stamps and invited him to his room to get some.

While there, the boy added, Sir Ian committed an offence. He was given his stamps and afterwards he attended chapel – and so did Sir Ian.” [Daily Mirror, 4 June 1962]

Daily Mirror, 19 June 1962

contd. from above, Daily Mirror, 19 June 1962

Mirror, 18 July 1962

Horobin was sentenced to four years in prison and moved to Tangiers on his release, where boys were in more plentiful supply with less fear of criminal repercussions.

Daily Express, Wednesday 18 July 1962

contd., Daily Express, 18 July 1962

‘He referred to homosexuals as “us poor devils who are born like this; nothing can change me. It is natural for some people to love boys in this way.” Subsequently at a party Horobin said the touch of a woman sickened him and the law on homosexuality was silly.’

In 1923, having already fought in the Great War serving in the RNVR and at the youthful age of 24, Horobin had become Warden of Mansfield House University Settlement including Fairbairn Hall, Plaistow in East London. His father had been Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge. Here at No. 310, Barking Road not too far from the Mile End Road’s Regal Billiard Hall in Eric Road where by the mid-fifties a twenty year old Ronnie Kray was also admiring the view of boys taking their shots at the snooker tables, Horobin could be found patting boys on the rear as they took their shot,

“Fairbairn Boys Club was founded in the late 1800’s by Lady Trowe in the Leas Hall, Canning Town, for the underpriviledged children of the East End. Fairbairn is actually a Scottish word meaning ‘good child’. The Club moved to Fairbairn hall in Barking Road, Plaistow in 1923 where it flourished in all sports including Boxing, Rugby, Cricket and Football. Famous sports personalities to emerge through the Club are Billy Walker, Terry Spinks, Graham Gooch, Alan Sealey and Alan Curbishley …” http://www.londonaba.co.uk/clubs/North-East/Fairbairn-ABC

“Decline followed the First World War of 1914-18. In1920 residents returned to Mansfield House. 1921 saw the setting up of teacher training courses. In 1923 the Men’s club premises were sold. However Ian (later Sir Ian) Horobin, honorary warden 1923-61 revived and expanded the local work. In 1926 the Lady Trower Trust was formed to administer East Ham playing fields (between present day Burgess Road and the A40) and camp-sites at Lambourne End and Sandwich. 1928, and social work training courses were set up; 1931 Fairbairn Hall was re-designed and extended and opened by Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V1 and Queen Elizabeth); 1935: new residences built in Avenons Road; 1938: chapel added with 100 Anglican and Non-Conformist ordination candidates a year. By 1938 Fairbairn Boys and Men’s Clubs had a membership of 5000.”

http://www.newhamstory.com/node/2584 “Fairbairn House, originally opened in 1900, was greatly enlarged during the 1930s incorporating a beautiful Art Deco interior designed by the architect Grey Wornum, who was also responsible for the interiors of the Cunard ocean liner Queen Elizabeth. New sports facilities at Burges Road, in East Ham (1925), and a sixty acre farm on the outskirts of London at Lambourne End (1935) – used for camping and other outdoor activities – were presented to the Settlement by the Lady Trower Trust.” http://www.aston-mansfield.org.uk/about/our-history/

As Matthew Parris and Kevin Maguire also point out, it was for Horobin’s charitable work in the East End, including prodigious fund-raising, Macmillan was to offer him a peerage in 1962.

“In 1923 he had practically re-founded the Mansfield House University Settlement, a young men’s and boy’s club, raising over half a million pounds for its upkeep. He was its warden, living in a small bedsit above the dining room.” (Great Parliamentary Scandals, 2004 edition, p.144 below)

So far, so very Smith & Savile…like Smith’s control over Knowl View in Rochdale, trumpeting his own ‘social work’ skills and sacrifices in letters to Social Work Today and Savile’s propensity to secure himself living quarters at various institutions across the British Isles and raise vast sums of money, Horobin’s charitable and philanthropic front also gave him access and opportunity to abuse. Parris and Maguire relay Terence Stamp’s memories of Horobin from his autobiography:

“After boxing bouts the boys would occasionally find Horobin supervising proceedings in the communal bath area, perched on a shooting stick. They called him ‘Spike’. One old boy, the actor Terence Stamp, recalls how ‘there was all kinds of gossip about Sir Ian, the strongest being that he was a bit of a “ginger beer”.’ Despite the rumours, Stamp’s autobiography describes how, aged fourteen, he was ‘chuffed’ to receive an invitation to Horobin’s flat one Saturday afternoon to show off some paintings he had entered in a competition.” (Great Parliamentary Scandals, p.144)

The facilities were a vast draw to the 1950s East-End/Essex teenaged boy and many a friendship and sporting careers were begun at Fairbairn House. Billy Walker, an amateur boxer while working as a doorman for Savile at the Ilford Palais, aged 16, trained at Fairbairn Amateur Boxing Club on Barking Road

“The Second World War of 1939-45 brought disruption. Post war developments saw Joan Littlewoods’ Acting School accommodated (1961). By 1962 membership had dropped to one third after Ian Horobins’ departure.” http://www.newhamstory.com/node/2584

Perhaps coincidentally it was through Joan Littlewood that Tom Driberg MP would come to know the Krays who were part of the milieu celebrating ‘Sparrers can’t Sing’ although already wary of being seen with the Krays: “Tom Driberg didn’t turn up. He’d already been photographed with the Krays and didn’t like it.” It was during Joan Littlewood’s use of Horobin’s Fairbairn facilities, also used by The Mansfield Players, that reports of Horobin’s behaviour with boys had finally been reported to the Deputy Warden in 1961.

“Ian Horobin (1899 – 1976), a war hero who had shown exemplary courage as a prisoner of the Japanese, sat as Conservative MP for Oldham East from 1951 to 1959, serving as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Power during his last year in the House of Commons. In 1962 Macmillan recommended him for a life peerage, and his elevation had been gazetted when Horobin suddenly withdrew his acceptance of it owing to the fact that, in the interim, he had been charged with indecent assault. For almost forty years, he had served as Warden of Mansfield House University Settlement, a club for boys and young men in the East End, where he lived in a small flat: his work there was recognised with a knighthood in 1955, but his homosexual tastes were common knowledge among the boys, who were well rewarded if they agreed to satisfy his fairly innocent desires, and with some of whom he formed affectionate relationships. However, in 1961 his activities were denounced to the authorities by a clergyman, and after a trial at which he was defended by a former parliamentary colleague, the future Attorney-General Peter Rawlinson QC, he was sent to prison for four years. Horobin, who spent his last years in Tangier, remained unrepentant about his way of life, telling his friend the poet John Betjeman” “I broke the law with my eyes open all my life until I went to prison. I broke it in prison. I broke it immediately I came out of prison, and I have not the slightest intention of ever paying any attention to it.’

[Closet Queens, Michael Bloch, 2015 Loc 2886/5565]

10 shillings in today’s money is just under £10; £2 in 1962 is worth just under £40 today.

I can’t really work out why there’s still such an indulgent attitude to this very day regarding Sir Ian Horobin’s abuse of underage boys, or why he is considered to be gay when his sexual preferences were quite clearly for boys under the age of 16 and his development of Fairbairn Hall was driven by the same desires as Sir Cyril Smith – to provide him with a selection of children from which to choose. Perhaps Parris, Maguire and Bloch have either not read the newspaper reports of his offences at the time (or Rawlinson’s autobiography) or they have done their research and instead wish to gloss over sexual assaults of 11 year olds as if they’re a quaint peccadillo and synonymous with being gay which sadly is exactly the kind of conflation PIE and PIE’s Peter Righton capitalised on.

In his early forties by the time the Second World War broke out, Horobin served in the RAF as a squadron leader and became a Japanese Prisoner of War with Laurens Van Der Post in Soekaboemi in Java. Van Der Post who died in December 1996 became spiritual guru to first the Prince of Wales during the 70s through his wife Ingaret becoming Charles’ Jungian psychoanlsyst , and then as an informal adviser to Margaret Thatcher, his Chelsea neighbour, during the Falklands War. Van Der Post considered he owed his life to Horobin (The night of the new moon, 1970) and wrote in 1989 to the Times saying:

” IanHorobin , a minister-to-be in Macmillan’s government, frail and badly tortured at the outset, was one of the few I could trust with the knowledge of our secret radio. He came to me the day after the news of Hiroshima to say: “At prayers this morning I watched our hosts as usual bowing to the rising sun. Poor devils. Bloody poor devils!” and he burst into tears.”

Prior to the WWII Laurens Van Der Post had come to Britain from South Africa, the Woolfs publishing his first book In a Province (1934) via William Plomer’s contacts and having struck up a relationship with the Queen Mum’s poetry writing cousin Lilian Bowes-Lyon, he settled his wife and son in a farm in Tetbury for a bit before sending them back to South Africa during the war where he didn’t see them for ten years. Following the War, he claimed to have become an aide to Lord Mountbatten in Indonesia where his Dutch language skills were in demand.

Five years following the war saw Lord Reith (the first and former head of the BBC in the 1920s recently noted for his interest in a 14 year old boys and a 12 year old girl) as head of the Colonial Development Centre asking Van Der Post to investigate the Kalahari Bushmen and during the 1950s Van Der Post’s reputation as an ‘explorer’ became settled. In 1982 Laurens Van Der Post’s position as a close friend of Prince Charles was cemented when he was appointed as godfather to Prince William at the same time he was bending Thatcher’s grateful ear on the Falklands. In 1983 two books of his, The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970) were to form the basis of the 1983 film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence starring David Bowie. However, in the early 1950s, while his friend Horobin was preying on teen boys, Van De Post was also known to have impregnated a 14 year old daughter of a family friend he’d been entrusted to look after on a sea voyage when he was 46, just before his second marriage to Jungian analyst, Ingaret. Apparently he sent money although never properly acknowledging the daughter he’d left the child with or how she’d had to return home alone from her place at the Royal Ballet School, a fact confirmed by one of Van Der Post’s daughters 11 years ago, Lucia – now a Times beauty and luxe spending journalist:

“As for Mr. Jones’s allegations about her father’s relationship with a 14-year-old girl, ”I’m afraid I think that’s true,” Ms. Crichton-Miller said. ”He was not a saint. He hurt people. He hurt me. But by God, he was fascinating.” Master StoryTeller or Master Deceiver, New York Times, 03/08/2003

New York Times, 03/08/2003

“In the 1970’s van der Post met Prince Charles through mutual friends. In 1987 he took Charles on a four-day trip to the Kalahari, telling the prince, ”This is the real Africa.” Mr. Jones states that sometime in the mid-70’s, Charles began having psychoanalytic treatment with Ingaret, who was a Jungian analyst, and then with van der Post’s friend Dr. Alan McGlashan. Diana, Princess of Wales, was also treated by Dr. McGlashan during the troubles in her marriage, Mr. Jones writes. Christian Science Monitor Charles told van der Post his dreams, and van der Post drafted some of his speeches. When van der Post died, Charles set up an annual lecture in his honor. But van der Post’s most significant influence occurred during the South African struggle over apartheid, Mr. Jones says. Van der Post hated Nelson Mandela and championed the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whom he saw as a foil for the African National Congress’s Communist beliefs. He arranged meetings between Chief Buthelezi, Charles and Mrs. Thatcher. Mr. Jones argues that van der Post had helped convince Mrs. Thatcher to oppose sanctions against the South African government and not to embrace Mr. Mandela. As van der Post lay dying, Mr. Jones says, Charles visited him. At his memorial service, Lady Thatcher read the lesson and Chief Buthelezi spoke. Nonetheless, Mr. Jones writes, there were apparently some who doubted van der Post even when he was alive. Mr. Jones says that when a doctor who knew him was asked the cause of his death, the doctor replied, ”He was weary of sustaining so many lies.”

Supermac: From one scandal to another to another to resignation

In 1958 Macmillan had raised one ‘rogue’ to the House of Lords, his nemesis in love, Lord Bob Boothby who was having an affair with his wife Lady Dorothy Cavendish. On 22 August 1958, 4 years earlier, Macmillan had already offered Boothby a peerage under pressure of Boothby’s continued affair with his wife Dorothy. Lord Robert or ‘Bob’ Boothby was a cad (not a bounder as the Queen Mother would have it apparently). Within 6 years Boothby was to feature in the headline the Peer and the Gangster, see John Pearson’s article in The Sunday Independent (15th June 1996) for further details. In the meantime Macmillan’s position became increasingly unstable under the pressure of other burgeoning scandals. In December 1961 Mariella Novotny was holding her ‘sexy parties’ at 13, Hyde Park Square to which Stephen Ward was inviting Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies so the long fuse of the Profumo Affair had been lit well before the fateful weekend at Cliveden. In 1962, as above, Sir Ian Horobin MP’s predatory activities on East End boys were revealed while late that year the activities of John Vassall became known, of whom Macmillan had said “You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble once he’s caught’ (as quoted by Parris & Maguire p.147). In 1963 Lord Boothby and Tom Driberg MP social activities with the Kray’s increase in boldness with Boothby inviting Ron to the House of Lords. By October 1963 Macmillan had resigned, 18 months after he had first nominated and offered Horobin his position as a life peer.

Sir Ian Horobin however appears to have bounced back with a poetry publication from new publishers Jameson Press at 160, Albion Road, N16 and a foreword written by John Betjeman – after having laid low in Tangiers for just over a decade. Mentions of his court case and conviction are as if it were for purely homosexual offences as opposed to sexually assaulting boys of 13 and 14, getting his ‘sweetheart’ when he reached 17 to recruit other, younger ‘sweethearts’ for him (the emotional callousness of which always belies the ‘paedophiles’ argument of love, when really they’re in love with the bloom and fade of youth at their fixated preference age) and therefore his claims to be indestructible appear to apply not just to surviving a Japanese Prisoner of War camp but in also minimising the stigma of a reputation marred by child sexual abuse despite convictions. And what difference does it make if “Even the Elms are dead”?

In amongst my readings on Savile (and others’ perceptions of Savile at the time through biographies and autobiographies) I came across what I thought was a fascinating book, or rather a piece of sociological research/Community Study published as a book, by one of Savile’s acquaintances during the Sixties, set in a location under 100 miles from Glencoe. Glencoe, or more specifically Alt-Na-Reigh was the location of Savile’s beloved cottage which he had first spied on a cycling trip somewhere during the 1940s as a teenager.

What compelled me to purchase and read the book was the inclusion of this comment at the close of a book review featured in the Catholic Herald in 1985

“On the eve of the book going to press a local resident wrote thus to Giarchi: “The democratic structure of this nation is a hoax. The UK is ruled by the USA . . . no Parliament can control the situation.” The evidence gathered in the book makes it hard to refute such a depressing conclusion — this should be recommended as reading for those in Whitehall.” (Into a threatened Scottish Paradise, Catholic Herald, 15/03/1985, Stewart Foster)

About as heavy and hard-hitting a comment you could ever hope to evoke in response to publishing your doctoral thesis, one imagines!

The title refers to the unenviable position of a town in Scotland on the firth of Clyde, Dunoon at Holy Loch under pressure of events beyond their control

1. The Military Invasion once the US Naval Submarine base Polaris was established in 1960

2. The Industrial Invasion with the influx of McAlpine navvies (navigational engineers – or construction workers on major projects such as canals or in this case, North Sea oil rigs) during

3. The bureaucratic take-over when the Dunoon Burg is annexed under the Glasgow administration due to regionalisation.

About the Author

Originally brought up in Dunoon as a child (during 1930s/1940s?), in 1967 George Giarchi had a brief sojourn with Savile in the spotlight as a Pop Priest (a Jesuit Scottish Redemptorist) conducting pop preach-ins and missions in London and Edinburgh. These were featured in The Tablet and The Catholic Herald. He returned to Dunoon over nineteen months, arriving in late 1974, the year of two elections, until February 1976 to conduct a unique sort of community study under a post-graduate studentship at the University of Glasgow financed by the Social Science Research Council.

From the Foreword

“George Giarchi knows Dunoon. He was brought up there as a child and holds its people in respect and affection. He achieved a long-nourished ambition when, with the support of a post-graduate studentship at the University of Glasgow, he was able to return and study the community. His project was an ambitious one but despite the cautious words of his academic mentors not to let it get out of hand, his enthusiasm was unbounded and was matched only by his energy. Community studies in Britain are something of a lost art these days. For one person to accomplish so much on his own is even more unusual. Once he escaped the confines of the Sociology department there was no stopping him.

What George Giarchi manages to convey is the way in which social changes occur in the community. Remote it may be, but Dunoon is locked into the wider military-political national and international context of the cold war and the economic context of the oil industry. In the course of his study some of the mystifications which obscure decision-making are revealed and the rhetoric with which the powerful seek to justify their actions made plain.

Between McAlpine and Polaris does not fit easily into the British tradition of community studies. With its concern to uncover the history that is made behind our backs this is a book which has definite affinities with the American muckraking tradition. There is a sharp awareness of the arbitrary way in which institutional power can shape the lives and destinies of people not only in the great metropolitan cities but also in the rural areas. This makes uncomfortable reading not least because much is done in the name of democracy, the national interest, or even Western civilisation that cannot be readily justified by rational argument. At least, however, the questions can still be asked and the critical voice heard. So long as that remains possible the sociologist will have a public role to perform. George Giarchi has given us a book which is stimulating, sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing and above all infused with a generous humanism.”

(Foreword, by Professor J.E.T. Eldridge, p. xi)

“George G. Giarchi is Head of Department of Social Work, Health and Community Studies at Plymouth Polytechnic. A graduate of the universities of Bradford, Leeds and Glasgow, he has had a varied career: in the 1960s he worked as a counsellor in several major British cities, and in the 1970s he was a social worker in Glasgow.”

During 1967 Fr. Giarchi conducts ‘Preach-Ins’ in Manchester and Edinburgh “In Manchester 1,500 young people turned up every night for two weeks and in Edinburgh 12,000 went along to hear him.”

“One of the highlights of the two-week “preach-in” is a 10-mile charity walk led by Jimmy Savile, the disc jockey. Fr. Giarchi had a bit of trouble over him with a girl from an international news agency. The wires got crossed and she thought Jimmy Savile had become a Jesuit.”

During the Fifties London’s Catholic High Society had worshipped at Farm Street, names such as Evelyn Waugh (father of Auberon, who would later comment of Savile that he, Auberon might as well babble of green fields because Savile had Thatcher’s ear so tightly held) and Clarissa Churchill (later to marry Anthony Eden) and Princess Diana’s stepmother Raine Spencer.

“Fr. Giarchi is a 36 year-old Scottish Redemptorist who turned trendy after a Christian education course at Corpus Christi Catechetical College. He’s already had big hits with his unusual approach. In Manchester 1,500 young people turned up every night for two weeks and in Edinburgh 12,000 went along to hear him.” (Flowers in Farm Street, Catholic Herald, 6 October 1967)

In March 1968 Giarchi has 200 nuns rocking at the Liverpool Catholic Teachers Federation’s conference on primary education- Lord Longford addresses the group and Bishop Harris receives a delegation from teenage girls on the subject of Authority and he asks them to be his links to teenagers.

*****Updated 23/07/2014******

Dan Davies’ new (and very detailed, horribly close and the more I read…haunting) biography of Savile ‘In Plain Sight‘ has this to say:

“On one occasion, [Savile] was invited to speak to a group of nuns who taught at schools in Lancashire. The event was organised by a Jesuit priest, Father George Giarchi, who Savile had worked with on a series of ‘pop missions for teenagers’.

‘Children want the chance to respect people,’ Savile told the sisters. ‘They know they’ve got to have authority, and that there must be a penalty when they do wrong.’ He explained that teenagers were ’80 per cent don’t knows, 10 per cent “right” people and 10 per cent hard cases,’ and advised the nuns to concentrate on the 80 per cent because ‘It’s better to save a load of the could-be’s, than waste time on the ones born to be double villains.’ As a parting shot he said that he would pray for them, adding ‘and I hope you’ll pray for me.’ He naturally failed to mention his own special focus on those teenagers that could not be saved.

Dave Eager told me he remembered accompanying Savile to some of Father Giarchi’s ‘preach-in’ events, which were aimed squarely at the young. ‘He was a character,’ Eager said of the priest. ‘It was all anti-drugs, anti-underage sex, live the Catholic life, that sort of thing.’ I tried on more than one occasion to contact George Giarchi, who left the clergy i nthe 1970s, for comment, but got no reply.

‘[The clergy] had never heard anything like it,’ Savile said after their first appearance together. ‘I was honest with them. I told them all about sex and drugs and the dangers. I didn’t mince words. And they believed me.'”

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About the book

There’s a particular quote of Savile’s from As it Happens which conveys his creepy sense of pride as he would carefully increase and decrease the beats per minute of each record in order to lull or excite the dancing crowd before him – which sometimes pops into my head in order to refocus my thoughts: “It wasn’t power; it was an effect.”

Professor Giarchi’s distinctly uncreepy and pragmatic approach to giving context in part manages to convey the hidden levers, influences and effects of change, and as his dedication suggests, owes much to the inspiration of Reverend Father Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889), ‘ For Clare, who introduced me to the ‘inscape’ of Hopkins and widened my understanding of life’. Hopkins was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert and Jesuit priest who looked to describe in unique detail moments in time or landscapes examining both the ‘outscape’ and the ‘inscape‘.

Giarchi is a powerful lens in adopting such an interesting perspective, not just by looking for the inscape of Dunoon and the effects of change on people uniquely as well as a whole, but also in his choice of quote for Chapter 1 Setting the Scene. Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian refugee and Sociology lecturer at the London School of Economics who was briefly before his death, the Chair of the Institute of Education during 1946-47, and is perhaps best known for being a founding father of the sociology of knowledge:

“It is not to be denied that if the point of view from which the analysis is made were pressed further there would be much more to be explained. The extent to which a concept explains something can never be absolute; it always keeps step with the expansion and intensification of insight.” (Karl Mannheim 1936, Ideology and Utopia London: Routledge & Kegan Paul p.175 (1960 edition))

Preamble, Between McAlpine and Polaris, (1984)

The holistic and thorough approach with which Giarchi takes care to piece together a snapshot in time makes for compelling reading and ultimately describes a perfect storm for increasing criminality and volatility in the local community not least which became the pressing issue of…

Underage Sex, Brothels and how to cater to the influx of US Navy and McAlpine Navvies

Amongst all the other drastic effects and changes, not least the annexation of the Dunoon Burgh into the Glasgow administration decimating local democracy, the influx of US Naval Ratings and McAlpine Navvies created a demand for young females that was to cause persistent tensions. In Giarchi’s book he charts the build up through excerpts from the local newspaper the Dunoon Observer to which he had access to the archives.

From the inception of Polaris in 1960 underage sex had become a problem, with illegitimacy rates doubling and questions being asked in Parliament. Giarchi’s research charts glimpses of a burgeoning sex trade in the form of local brothels being forced further out of town, pushed ‘on the other side’ of the Clyde ,nearer Glasgow until more formalised arrangements spring up whereby the US Naval Sponsor would rent a flat to hold sexy parties to the essential role of taxis in ferrying punters and prostitutes, elevating them to an essential source of information on the goings on which Giarchi taps most successfully.

Singing hymns to tigers

A letter to the Dunoon Observer (5th May 1962):

“Disgruntled American would do well to remember that Scottish upbringing and education differs substantially from their own and that such a document as the Kinsey Report is unlikely to make us feel that their methods produce results we would like to see in this country.”

There was growing “local unrest over what many people regarded as sexual exploitation of Cowal girls by US sailors. Women locally had had a lesser place in cultural terms within a male-dominated society, none the less the sailors’ ‘dollie’ image of girls, and their US brand of male chauvinism (projected in their ‘hello baby’ attitude towards girls) troubled many local parents, especially the Presbyterians.”

-Autumn 1961: Disturbances caused by the USN men ashore had forced the Captain of Proteus to introduce a curfew

On 1 April 1962 The Sunday Mail reported a deputation to Proteus to ask ‘Don’t date our girls call to Proteus’. ‘Presbyterian residents complained that USN personnel were dating girls who were under sixteen years of age.’ Local magistrates had grouped together to tell the Captain of the Proteus “Stop your men from dating schoolgirls under the age of 16.” The ship’s spokesman had replied: “Our men are expected to behave like gentlemen, but whom they date is a matter of personal preference.” “An irate father had complained about the typical American sailor who would court a schoolgirl under sixteen as someone beyond control, stating: ‘anything the Captain would say to this type of man would be as ineffective as singing hymns to a tiger’.

“But something more serious than the dating habits of the USN personnel had been raised. A young girl had written in the issue of 16 June 1962 stating that ‘there are brothels in Dunoon.”‘ (Dunoon Observer, 16 June 1962)

In August 1963 a VD clinic was announced as opening soon at the local Dunoon Cottage Hospital and following a police raid in August 1963 a Dunoon “call-girl” facility consisting of at least 22 girls was exposed (Dunoon Observer and Argyllshire Standard, 29/06/1963)

Chapter 10, p.234

1967….Enter Peter Dorschel and Nicholas Fairbairn…

Giarchi doesn’t appear to mention one other consequence of Dunoon becoming caught in an axis of geo-political-military-oil tussling: like moths to a flame came wannabe spooks and real spooks.

Twenty years prior to publishing his autobiography ‘A Life is Too Short’ – Volume One (Volume Two is yet to be published and is unknown whether it was written before Fairbairn’s death in February 1995) in June 1967, Nicholas Fairbairn found himself defending a German spy accused of passing US navy information to the USSR under cover of a local hotel at Hunter’s Quay, a spot with a good view of the US Naval base Polaris at Holy Loch. Fairbairn had become a father for the first time just over a year previously, aged 33 or 34, and was in the process of a fling with Esther Rantzen as well as playing the character of John Profumo at The Traverse Theatre. His legal and political careers were yet to take off fully – it was to be five years before being made a QC, seven years before being elected MP Kinross and West Perthshire, and twelve years prior to being appointed Thatcher’s Solicitor General, Scotland, missing out on the position of Lord Advocate much to his own surprise and chagrin.

But back to June 1967:

“Now a new experience entered my life: serious broadcasting on television. Although I had frequently appeared on the box I had not previously been recruited to undertake a series. I did a pilot broadcast of the series ‘Your Witness’ on television which was chaired by Ludovic Kennedy and my advisers were the barbigerous Matthew Spicer and the seductive and goluptious Esther Rantzen, whose hypersensual voice has been such a balm and stimulant to television audiences. All three have been friends ever since. Returning to Edinburgh from the programme, I played the part, at the Traverse Theatre, of John Profumo in a dramatic production of the Denning Report, directed by Gordon MacDougall, who had quietly succeeded Jim Haines as the theatre director. His gentle and unruffable character had enabled the traumas of Haines’s departure to be passed over and the wounds to heal. I inserted into the script the apt words from the Rape of Lucrece:

‘Why should the private pleasure of someone
Become the public plague of many more?
For one’s offence why should so many fall
To plague a private sin in general?” (A Life is Too Short, Nicholas Fairbairn, Fontana, 1987)

That June Nicholas Fairbairn defended Peter Dorschel at Dunoon Sheriff’s Court, his trial for spying having been transferred from Manchester where he’d been caught near Prestwich. Dorschel was an Eastern German, aged who’d been recruited by USSR and funded to buy a small hotel which he’d chosen in view of the Polaris base. At his trial he was convicted for offences under the Official Secrets Act, although his prowess as a spy was laughed at during the trial when it was revealed he had sent his spy bosses picture postcards of locations when they’d asked for photos.

“Spying does not play a very large part in the life of Scotland, so far anyway. It would if we became, which God forbid, an independent, oil-fired, tartan ruritanian tax-haven. I next appeared for one Peter Dorschel, a German who was charged that’ he tried to solicit and induce and endeavor to persuade another person to commit an offence under the Official Secrets Act 1911 for a purpose prejudicial to the safety and interest of the State.’ He did indeed obtain certain document which were an engineer’s plans of the lay-out of the lavatory in a Polaris submarine. I hope the Russians found them useful. Would that was all the plans they ever got. Lords Grant rightly and brusquely imprisoned him for seven years.”

One wonders how far Fairbairn’s defence caused much of the mirth, more so than Dorschel’s actions themselves or whether his acting talents ever tempted him into playing to the gallery with descriptions of Dorschel’s bumbling foray into spying, characterised as a very brief, isolated incident, quickly nipped in the bud.

“Before she had the affair with Wilcox she had one with Nicholas Fairbairn MP. What did she learn from him about the political world? ‘Nothing.’ Too young? ‘I think he was a barrister then. What I did learn about was the law. That a clever defence lawyer can run rings around the police. Nicholas was a dandy. He designed his own bowler hats.’” (Esther Rantzen, Our Lady of Luton, Telegraph, 08/01/2010)

And yet when reading about Giarchi’s observation that everyone appears to have ignored brothels being run in Dunoon five years earlier and the specific concerns of parents that US Navy Ratings seemed particularly focused on pubescent but young teenage girls under 16, one has to wonder if the means for Dorschel and others to make contacts to receive documents from the US Navy base was under cover of something with more leverage than merely a hotel?

1. Did Nicholas Fairbairn ever finish Volume Two of his Autobiography – Volume One ends as he enters Parliament and I’d like to have read more about his long parliamentary career and decisions taken as Solicitor General for Scotland?

2. Did Savile ever read Between McAlpine and Polaris? You sense he already knew the business and criminal opportunities great change wrought upon local communities when he writes about the black market created out of the upheaval during WWII and how much he clearly relished living in Leeds ‘the City of Sin’? Residential care homes located within easy distance of military bases would be of concern.

3. I have a spare copy of Between McAlpine and Polaris should anyone in Whitehall wish to take up the recommendation. No postage necessary.